The same Turkish scholar whose library formed the foundation of the Medici Oriental Press’s Arabic-language publishing program was picked by Pope Gregory XIII to serve on his committee for calendar reform. Through him the Muslim astronomical tradition must have contributed to the Gregorian calendar. Soon Jesuit scholars would carry astronomical devices and advanced calendrical calculations to the court of the Wanli emperor in China, where they would serve as examples of Western achievements and provide the missionaries with an entrée to the Ming court, which saw the need to reform its own calendar.
Despite its early brilliance, Islamic astronomy had fallen into decline by the end of the sixteenth century — perhaps in part because it had largely accomplished its goals of determining the correct time for prayers and finding the direction of Mecca — when one last great effort was made to revive it. Taqi al-Din Muhammad ibn Ma’ruf, chief astronomer to the Ottoman empire, succeeded in having a large astronomical observatory built in Istanbul in 1577, around the time that Tycho Brahe was constructing Uraniborg. He hoped to use the observatory to update existing astronomical data, but his hopes were dashed when Sultan Murad III consulted him regarding the recent appearance of a large comet. In the Muslim world as in Europe, astronomers were expected to produce horoscopes and prognostications based on celestial events. Taqi al-Din reported that the comet presaged a particularly rosy period; instead, Turkey experienced an outbreak of plague. The observatory project never regained momentum following Taqi al-Din’s catastrophically errant prediction, and the observatory was torn down in 1580, only three years after it had been built.
Draft-paper copy by Antonio de Sangallo the Younger, early sixteenth century, perhaps Rome; and original astrolabe by Khafif Ghulam ’Ali b. ’Isa, mid-ninth century, Baghdad.
Planispheric astrolabe, seventeenth century. India. Brass with inlaid silver. The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, SC153.
Antonio de Sangallo, architect of St. Peter’s cathedral in Rome, apparently took an interest in Islamic scientific instruments. As George Saliba has shown, his copy of a several-hundred-year-old Arabic astrolabe is so exact that the name of the original maker can be read. European interest in such devices facilitated the exachange of scientific knowledge and reflected a desire for accurate implements of measurement.
The large (about two-foot-tall) Indian astrolabe on the facing page also demonstrates cross-cultural connections: it combines Muslim and Hindu elements with inscriptions in both Arabic and Sanskrit.
Taqi al-Din’s observatory had been stocked with all sorts of state-of-the-art scientific instruments. Along with a 6,000-entry table for timekeeping based on solar observations, a manuscript in his hand in the library of the Kandilli Observatory in Turkey contains his observations on stereographic projection and notations on observational instruments. Scientific and navigational devices, rather than the theoretical astronomy that influenced Copernicus, provided most Europeans’ exposure to Islamic science. Such objects, which generally responded to a new thirst for accurate measurements in a variety of real-world contexts, were sold and traded widely; among the most common were astrolabes, quadrants, calendar scrolls, and celestial globes.
Astrolabe technology was related to that of clocks. Clocks, though not a recent invention, became more common in the early seventeenth century — Kepler said that the universe was “similar to a clock.” Before clocks were in widespread usage, timekeeping was marked by rituals and by the tolling of church bells. Adaptation of clock technology would contribute to increasing regularization of work hours and a new differentiation between work and leisure time.
Astrolabes had many uses, but chief among them was aid in the determination of time, location, and direction by reference to celestial objects. Muslims had been navigating the Indian Ocean, sometimes with the aid of sailors’ astrolabes, for centuries. Zheng He, admiral of the early Ming Chinese treasure fleets, had followed the extensive network of Muslim trade routes to reach Africa; Vasco da Gama, the first European to sail to the Indian Ocean, also followed existing routes. In fact, upon reaching the east coast of Africa one of da Gama’s first objectives was to obtain the services of a Muslim navigator. Initially he had attempted to recruit a Swahili navigator but they all declined, “even though they were put to torture” (the torture was double because it involved dropping on the victims’ skins boiling oil from pork fat). Finally he found a “Moor of Gujarat” who was well familiar with those waters, and who provided his own navigational instruments and sea charts. India in those years was known for producing high-quality instruments; a Mughal workshop in Lahore, comprising at least four generations of one family, produced a large number of astronomical instruments during the reign of Jahangir.
When da Gama arrived at Calicut in India, it is said, he first sent ashore a convict to test the reception he might expect. To the guinea pig’s relief he received a friendly welcome. “Are you Portuguese or Spanish?” the Indians wondered, and they took him to North African translators fluent in European languages. Clearly the world of the Indian Ocean was a cosmopolitan place before the Europeans’ arrival.
Navigational and measuring devices had circulated widely since the late medieval period. The earliest astrolabes in Europe had apparently entered through Muslim Spain. They quickly became so popular that the famous French lovers Abélard and Héloïse named their son Astrolabe. Geoffrey Chaucer wrote a Treatise on the Astrolabe that owed a debt, ultimately, to West Asian sources (in particular the eighth-century Persian Jewish astronomer Masha’allah ibn Atharī). By the early seventeenth century a family of Flemish astrolabists was familiar enough with Arabic to adapt a thirteenth-century astrolabe made in Muslim Spain for use in northern lattitudes (which required identifying celestial objects through their Arabic labels). The designs of this family’s astrolabes also show Arabic influence.
In 1616 maritime globalism stimulated demand for mariners’ instruments. A French astrolabe in the collection of the Naval College of Coimbra in Portugal was signed by the maker, Nicol Paternal, and dated 1616. A mariner’s astrolable in the collection of the University of Saint Andrews was also signed, by Elias Allen, and dated 1616 — in the estimation of Robert Gunther, former curator of the Lewis Evans Collection at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, “in point of completeness it is the premier English Mariner’s Astrolabe in the world.”
Although Islamic science was in decline by the seventeenth century, leading intellectuals in Iran were pushing philosophical explorations to new heights. Foremost among these was the man known as Mulla Sadra, who is usually accounted the preeminent Islamic philosopher of the past several hundred years. In 1616, at the age of forty-six, he was probably living in the holy city of Qom, a center of Shi’a scholarship (his second daughter had been born there in 1615), where he was beginning to compose a series of innovative philosophical treatises.
Mulla Sadra had been born to an aristocratic family in Shiraz in southwest Iran. He seems to have been an only child, and his father indulged his interest in philosophy. He studied with notable philosophers in Shah Abbas’s capital city of Isfahan and elsewhere. He took an early interest in Sufism, a form of Islam that emphasizes denial of self and direct, personal communion with God (in this respect it is analogous to Northern European Protestantism). Sufis, so called from their sufs, or wool robes, are often described as mystics. They are associated with ecstatic dance, and wandering Sufi ascetics are termed dervishes.
Because of its bypassing of traditional authority, Sufism was controversial, and efforts were made to suppress it. While there is no evidence that Mulla Sadra was associated with any formal Sufi sect, his independent bent of mind antagonized leaders of the faith in Shiraz, and he was forced to relocate to a village called Kahak in northern Iran, where he spent several years in reflection and meditation and began his philosophical writing. In 1612 he was called back to Shiraz to inaugurate a new madrassa, or religious school, but within a few years he returned to Qom, which was near the place of his earlier r
etreat. In subsequent years he appears to have led an itinerant life, dividing his time between Qom, Istafan, and Shiraz, before settling permanently in the latter city in 1630; he also made several pilgrimages to Mecca. He died while attempting his seventh such journey. Perhaps his frequent travel helped him to elaborate his philosophy, in which motion is a fundamental element.
Among Mulla Sadra’s primary concerns was existentialism. Since ancient times philosophers influenced by Plato had argued that essence precedes existence — that there is some ideal form (called a “quiddity,” or “whatness”) of cat or tree or person, say, of which all earthly cats or trees or people are imperfect manifestations. Existence, in this view, is a kind of accident, and the world we live in is fundamentally flawed. Mulla Sadra, however, maintained that existence and reality were the same thing, and that the essences of the Platonic tradition were nothing but mental constructs derived from existence. The apparent multiplicity of the world, he said, results from different degrees or gradations of a single underlying reality. What’s more, because all reality is ultimately one, it cannot be readily grasped by the intellect, which is essentially divisive and limited.
Mulla Sadra viewed existence as constantly in flux; because it is always in motion, no single intellectual construct can encompass it. Existence is renewed instant by instant, and we are not the same people now that we were at the beginning of this paragraph. Mulla Sadra went on to assert that everything in existence has a consciousness, and since these things are gradations of a single reality they all yearn for a greater intensity of existence. In this way he arrived at a transcendental philosophy that emphasized inspiration and was generally consistent with the basic impulses of Sufism. Although a philosopher and not a scientist in the modern sense, Mulla Sadra, having built his philosophy on the premise that everything is constantly in motion, had formulated a deeply considered rebuttal to the traditional notion that the stars are fixed in an unchanging sky, at the same time that Galileo was reaching the identical conclusion through the path of close observation.
One European traveler who was said to have journeyed to the lands of Islam in search of esoteric knowledge was a mysterious figure at first known only as “C.R.” or “C.R.C.” Born in Germany, he was said to have left his home at sixteen and traveled to Arabia, where he received instruction in arcane knowledge from Islamic adepts. After three years there he moved on to Egypt and then Morocco, where he studied the kabbalah and became skilled in North African magical arts. He continued to Spain, where his newfound esoteric wisdom met an unfriendly reception, and to various European states where it was likewise rejected. Finally, back in Germany, he settled down to a quiet and obscure life, but after a few years he recruited a small band of loyal followers with whom he established a society devoted to his “secret and manifest philosophy.” The band swore an oath of agreement to a few principles such as healing the sick without charging for their services; wearing no special dress but passing as ordinary citizens; meeting once a year (or sending a letter explaining the reason for their absence); taking the initials “C. R.” as “their seal, mark, and character”; and recruiting a successor to carry on after their death.
The Invisible College of the Rose Cross Fraternity, 1618, by Theophilius Schweighardt.
This print, one copy of which was bound into a book published in 1618 under the pen name Theophilus Schweighardt, alludes to the first Rosicrucian manifesto, the Fama (the word fama appears under the ribbon over the building’s cupola). The building is winged and on wheels; it appears to hang by a thread held by a hand that emerges from a cloud where the name Jehova appears in Hebrew: this alludes to a passage at the conclusion of the Fama, “Under the shadow of thy wings, Jehova.” At the sides of the door are the Rosicrucian symbols of the rose and cross. The serpent and swan at the top refer to the new stars that had recently appeared in the constellations Serpentarius and Cignus; their appearance was considered to augur the arrival of a new prophet. The building is protected by battlements where shielded warriors brandish feathers. A kneeling figure transmits a prayer directly to Jehova; inside the building another figure appears engaged in alchemical researches. A trumpet projects from the right side of the building labeled “C.R.F.” — the F probably represents “frater” (brother) or “fraternitatis” (brotherhood). Opposite the trumpet is a sword labeled “Jul. de Campi”; this refers to a defense of the brotherhood by one Julianus de Campis, which was included in a 1616 edition of the manifestos.
In his masque The Fortunate Isles, and Their Union (the last masque of the Jacobean era, performed in 1625), Ben Jonson alluded to this print in satirizing Rosicrucianism (“outis” is Greek for “nobody”):
Know ye not Outis? then you know nobody; —
The good old hermit, that was said to dwell
Here in the forest without trees, that built
The castle in the air, where all the Brethren
Rhodostaurotic live. It flies with wings,
And runs on wheels; where Julian de Campis
Holds out the brandish’d blade….
Eventually, at the age of 104, C.R. passed away, but the brotherhood continued. In 1604 — the same year that a new star appeared in the heavens, which Johannes Kepler suggested portended the appearance of a prophet who would unify and rationalize Christendom — C. R.’s tomb was miraculously discovered behind the wall of the house of a current member of the order. The seven-sided vault, which calls to mind the geometric forms that inspired Kepler, was marked with figures, symbols, and cryptic sentences, and the interior was divided in a pattern of triangles, circles, and other suggestive shapes. “Although the sun never shined in this vault,” the first text describing C. R. and his secret brotherhood tells us, “nevertheless it was enlightened with another sun, which had learned this from the sun.” A key belief of the brotherhood was that the macrocosm of the universe could be encapsulated within the microcosm of the human body. On an altar in the center lay the “fair and worthy body, whole and unconsumed” of C. R., who by this point had been dead 120 years, a parchment book in his hand. That book would guide further generations of the secret brotherhood, whose symbol would be the cross and rose, in their quest for esoteric wisdom.
Placing the Stone on the Mountain, 1617, probably by Matthieu Merian, engraving from Atalanta Fugiens by Michael Maier.
The third Rosicrucian manifesto, called The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, by Johann Valentin Andreae, recounts the journey of an elderly hermit to attend a royal wedding in a castle atop a mountain. Engravings in Atalanta Fugiens by Michael Maier, formerly the physician to Rudolf II, echo the flavor of Andreae’s text; both books were inspired by alchemy and Rosicrucianism. Maier uses classical mythology as symbols for alchemical processes. In a poem accompanying this engraving he writes, “If you believe mere words, your mind is weak, / For Saturn’s STONE in truth is CHEMICAL.” The Stone is the Philosopher’s Stone, the ultimate quest of alchemists; in Greek mythology Mount Helicon was the source of springs sacred to the Muses.
The caption to the engraving reads, “The Stone that Saturn vomited up, after having devoured it in place of his son, Jupiter, has been placed on Helicon as a monument for mortals.”
Such is the story told in the first of three Rosicrucian “manifestos” that were published anonymously between 1614 and 1616. The mysterious tale of symbols and secrets, which may have circulated in manuscript as early as 1610, was the Da Vinci Code of its day, causing a sensation in Europe. The second text, published in Latin in 1615, was a more scholarly elaboration on Rosicrucian beliefs. The third, published in 1616, was a remarkable romance of alchemical spiritualism called The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz; it confirmed that “C. R.” stood for Christian Rosenkreutz (sometimes also called Christian Rosy Cross). Alchemy is conventionally thought to have originated in Egypt and to have come to Europe through Arabic and Greek sources; the word alchemy came to European languages, through Spain, from the Arabic al-kimiya. The secret knowledge obtai
nable through chemistry that it promised was therefore associated with esoteric Arabic wisdom such as that Rosenkreutz was said to have obtained in his travels.
According to the Rosicrucian manifestos, it was possible for outsiders to win admittance to the society, but no instructions were given as to how this was to be accomplished. The French philosopher René Descartes was among those who publicly expressed a desire to join the brotherhood. Elias Ashmole, whose library would form the core of the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford, wrote a letter asking to join the order, though it is not clear that it was ever delivered to anyone. So far as is known, neither they nor any of the other petitioners ever received the invitation they sought to the secret society. Still, traces of Rosicrucian influence can be detected in writings of Francis Bacon and others.
The authorship of the manifestos has been debated ever since their publication, with most attention focused on Johann Valentin Andreae, a German theologian who admitted to having written the Chemical Wedding, although he denied, probably truthfully, having been the author of the first two texts, the Fama and the Confession. Andreae insisted that the Chemical Wedding was nothing but a “ludibrium” (a joke, jest, or farce), and in his later works, he disparaged Rosicrucianism (which was prudent since he had risen to a position of some prominence in the Lutheran church). But it is likely that the earlier manifestos were written by someone in his circle of scholars associated with Tübingen University, where Kepler (who was fifteen years older than Andreae) had also studied; the manifestos show an awareness of Kepler’s work, and their theme of harmonious correspondences resonates with his search for “the harmony of the world.” They may also reflect the influence of the occultist scholar John Dee, who had been an advisor and astrologer to Queen Elizabeth of England, and had later spent time among Rudolf II’s court and elsewhere in central Europe in the company of his somewhat sinister, reputedly clairvoyant assistant Edward Kelley, who summoned angelic messages by means of a crystal during seances. Dee had at least some familiarity with kabbalah and Arabic science, and it is possible the concept of “wisdom from the East” that is at the core of the Fama owes something to him.
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