The History of the Renaissance World: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  Chapter Six

  Reconquista and Rediscovery

  Between 1134 and 1146,

  Christian kings, Almoravid warriors, and Almohad caliphs

  battle on the Spanish peninsula,

  while more and more Arabic books reach the west

  IN 1134, the Spanish king Alfonso the Battler died after a lifetime on the battlefield.

  He had drawn the four Christian kingdoms of Spain—Aragon and Navarre, León and Castile—together under the joined crowns of himself and his wife Urraca. But the south of the Spanish peninsula had never been under his control. For over four hundred years, Muslim dynasties had ruled there instead.

  Nearly five decades earlier, a North African sect known as the Almoravids had crossed the Strait of Gibraltar into the Spanish peninsula. Within three years, the south of Spain was under Almoravid rule. The Christian kingdoms of the north fought back against the invaders, turning the center of the peninsula into a much contested battlefront. Their resistance gained energy when a church council at Toulouse, in 1118, gave the fight the status of crusade. Instead of traveling east, western noblemen with their private armies could now take the shorter journey west and earn the same spiritual rewards. Military orders—monks with swords—shouldered the task as well.*

  But the battlefield was large, and the enemy determined. In the east, crusades were measured in years. The crusade in Spain, the Reconquista, continued for centuries.

  By 1134, Almoravid power in Spain had weakened. The Almoravid ruler Ali ibn Yusuf, ruling from North Africa, was more concerned with African territories than with his trans-Mediterranean lands. Meanwhile, Christian strength had grown. Alfonso the Battler, earning his nickname, had pushed the Almoravid front back, and back, and back. For Alfonso, Spain was not merely a political realm. It was a sacred space where Christianity carried on its undying fight against evil. And so, when he died, he left his kingdom to the Knights Templar, the Hospitallers, and the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre: three of the military orders established to nurture holy warriors.

  His people ignored the bizarre will. The four kingdoms split apart: León and Castile under his stepson Alfonso VII,* Aragon under Alfonso the Battler’s brother Ramiro II (a monk who gave up his vows in order to be king, finding the two incompatible). Navarre, which had been under Aragonese control for nearly sixty years, threw its support behind Garcia Ramirez, a grandson of the legendary Christian warrior El Cid; he would rule an newly independent Navarre for sixteen years, earning himself the title of “the Restorer.”

  The separation of the once-united kingdoms could have provided the Almoravids with an opportunity to retake some of the lost land, but rot was spreading farther and farther into their realm. A new challenge to Almoravid power had arisen in Africa itself. A North African prophet named Ibn Tumart, a devout Muslim who had left his homeland to study his faith in Baghdad, had returned with a revelation: the end of time was near, and Ibn Tumart had been called to purify the practice of Islam and to unite its followers in dedication to Islamic law.

  At twenty-eight, he was blazingly charismatic, persuasive, and driven. The thirteenth-century historian al-Marrakushi says that on the journey back to North Africa, he preached so unceasingly to the sailors on the ship where he had bought passage that they threw him into the sea (he swam along in the wake until they had second thoughts and hauled him back on board). Before his premature death in 1130, he had managed to gain an enormous following: the al-muwahhidun, or Almohads, the Unified Ones.1

  One of Ibn Tumart’s followers, the soldier al-Mu’min, built on his theological groundwork and transformed the religious movement into one of conquest. By 1134, the Almohads had begun to push into the Almoravid land in North Africa. In Almohad eyes, the Almoravids were the enemy as much as the Christians farther north: Muslim but unpurified, corrupt lawbreakers.

  Fighting on two fronts, the Almoravids soon found themselves overmatched on both.

  On the Spanish peninsula, the Christian front had advanced to the south of Toledo. Toledo itself, hotly contested, was so dangerous a place that Alfonso VII made a nobleman he particularly distrusted its governor, a hopeful move since the previous governors of Toledo had all been killed in battle. The nearby castle of Oreja was an Almoravid base of operations, and in the spring of 1139, Alfonso VII laid siege to it: “The castle was very strong,” says the Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris, the official chronicle of Alfonso’s reign, “and was well fortified with all kinds of weapons and crossbows. Nevertheless, the emperor ordered his engineers to build siege towers and many engines with which to attack the castle, [and] he ordered sentries to be placed along the riverbank in order that he might destroy them by thirst.”2

  An Almoravid army arrived from Marrakesh to help beat Alfonso VII back. But the siege dragged on, until messengers hurried down from Oreja to Marrakesh to ask for further reinforcements. They were, says the Chronica, “confounded, for events were not turning out as they had wished,” and they got no joy from Marrakesh; informed that no more reinforcements were available, they were forced to return to Oreja with the message that they “should not harbour any hope and that they should surrender the castle to the emperor.”3

  Oreja surrendered in October. It was a major victory for Alfonso VII, who now set his eyes on Córdoba and Seville. Meanwhile, the Almoravids had suffered an even more serious defeat farther west. Alfonso VII’s cousin Afonso Henriques, who governed the Leonese province known as Portugal, had been carrying on the fight south of his own land. In July, he had won his first major victory against Almoravid armies: the Battle of Ourique, fought on a hilltop not far from the coast.

  Few contemporary details of the battle survive; it may have been little more than a large-scale raid into Almoravid-held territory.* But Afonso Henriques, cheered on by his men, declared himself king of Portugal immediately afterwards. This made him, in theory, independent of his royal cousin, and turned Portugal into a kingdom in its own right.

  Alfonso VII refused to recognize the title, but he did not immediately invade the rebellious province; he was too busy. By 1144, his army was approaching Córdoba and Seville. The Chronica tells us that they

  destroyed all the vines, olive groves and fig trees. They cut down and set alight all the orchards, set fire to their towns, villages and hamlets, and sent up in flames many of their castles. They took their men, women and children captive, and seized a great booty of horses, mares, camels, mules, asses, oxen, cows and every kind of beast, gold and silver, all the valuables which were in their homes. . . . All the kingdom . . . was destroyed.4

  The devastating victories placed Spain even more firmly in Christian hands.

  6.1 The Spanish Peninsula, 1144

  AROUND THAT SAME YEAR, the Italian scholar Gerard of Cremona traveled to the Spanish peninsula, hoping to find in the libraries of Toledo a copy of the second-century Greek astronomy text known as the Almagest.

  He was not the first Western thinker to make the journey. A century and half earlier, the future Pope Sylvester II had traveled to a monastery near the Muslim-Christian border; there, he learned to use the numbering system of the Arabs, discovered by them in their forays into India. Unlike the cumbersome Roman system, these numbers (generally now known as Hindu-Arabic numerals) relied on place for their value. (“The Indians have a most subtle talent,” marveled the monk Vigila, later in the tenth century, “this is clear in the 9 figures with which they are able to designate each and every degree of each order.”) He had been followed by a whole parade of Europeans and the occasional Englishman: among them Robert of Ketton and Hermann of Carinthia, who first translated the entire Qur’an into Latin, and Plato of Tivoli, who did the same with Arabic texts on astronomy and mathematics.5

  Now, with Gerard of Cremona, the rediscovery of Arabic texts surged forward. In Toledo, Gerard discovered a treasure trove of books he had never known existed. Among the books he unearthed in the dusty unused stacks of the Toledo libraries were a handful that had been translated from G
reek into Arabic, but had never before been read in the Latin-speaking West: the Physics of Aristotle, containing the philosophical explorations of being that the Aristotelian texts on logic did not touch; the Elements of Euclid; the Secrets of the great Greek physician Galen.

  “Seeing the abundance of books in Arabic on every subject,” one of his students later wrote, “he learned the Arabic language in order to be able to translate. . . . [T]o the end of his life, he continued to transmit to the Latin world (as if to his own beloved heir) whatever books he thought finest, in many subjects, as accurately and as plainly as he could.” By the time of his death, some thirty years later, Gerard had translated at least seventy-one major works on dialectic, astronomy, philosophy, mathematics, and medicine. A wall between the past and the present had been broken down, and more and more thinkers would step over the rubble into a new way of thinking.6

  6.1 Early thirteenth-century Arabic mansucript, showing Aristotle teaching Turkish astronomers.

  Credit: Bridgeman-Giraudon / Art Resource, NY

  * * *

  * A more detailed account is found in Bauer, The History of the Medieval World, pp. 664–666.

  * León-Castile had been held by Urraca since 1109; although it was part of the united realm of Alfonso VI, the couple was deeply estranged. When Urraca died in 1126, Alfonso VII (her son with her first husband, Raymond of Burgundy) took her place, still under the overarching authority of his stepfather, Alfonso the Battler.

  * In the years afterward, Ourique loomed larger and larger in Portuguese eyes: the number of Almoravid troops killed increased, the Portuguese valor expanded, and the victory swelled, until by the sixteenth century Afonso Henriques had defeated five Muslim kings after seeing, Constantine-like, a vision of Christ promising victory over the pagans. None of these details, however, are contemporary.

  Chapter Seven

  Questions of Authority

  Between 1135 and 1160,

  Peter Abelard shows the power of Aristotelian logic,

  and systematic theology is born

  SOMETIME AROUND 1135, the theologian Peter Abelard put the final touches on his latest project: the Theologia Scholarium, a treatise on the nature of God.

  He had been polishing and revising the Theologia for fourteen years, ever since the first version of the book had been condemned as dangerous error. Back then, Abelard had been forced by a church council in Soissons to throw his book into a bonfire with his own hands. Now he hoped to defend his orthodoxy.

  Instead, he would find himself facing yet another church council; and this time, the punishment would be more extreme.

  For over forty years, Abelard had lived and breathed language. He had spent his teens studying the works of Aristotle in Paris and sharpening his skill with words: “I preferred the weapons of dialectic to all other teachings of philosophy,” Abelard wrote, of his own early years, “and armed with these I chose the conflicts of disputation instead of the trophies of war.” In 1102, still only in his early twenties, he set up his own school in the French town of Melun. He taught and wrote, debated and argued; and his fame as a master of logic grew. By 1114, he had become master of the cathedral school at Notre Dame, the most prestigious in Western Francia.1

  Only one thing had ever distracted Peter Abelard from words: Heloise, the beautiful niece of the Parisian priest Fulbert. In a calculated act of seduction, Abelard rented a room from Heloise’s uncle and offered to tutor Heloise in order to work off his rent. “And so, with our lessons as a pretext,” he tells us, “we abandoned ourselves entirely to love. Her studies allowed us to withdraw in private, as love desired. . . . My hands strayed oftener to her bosom than to the pages . . . [and] our desires left no stage of lovemaking untried.”2

  The inevitable happened; Heloise became pregnant, and Abelard took her to stay with his sister in Brittany until the baby was born.

  Fulbert, who up until then had been remarkably blind to the affair, flew into a rage. Abelard apologized, groveled, reassured, and generally did his best to make amends to his powerful landlord, but the most straightforward solution—marriage—was not on the cards. The master of a cathedral school was, by definition, a churchman; celibacy was increasingly the rule for churchmen, and marriage would cut Abelard’s career off at the roots.

  Unable to appease the powerful Fulbert, Abelard finally proposed a solution. He would marry Heloise, but the marriage would remain secret so that his prospects at the school would not be blighted; Heloise would come back to her home in Paris, and Abelard would find lodging elsewhere. Fulbert agreed, but when Heloise—leaving her baby son in the care of Abelard’s family—returned to live in her uncle’s house, Fulbert made her life a misery. “In his exasperation,” Abelard records, “Fulbert heaped abuse on her. . . . As soon as I discovered this I removed her to a convent of nuns . . . near Paris.”

  The convent was a way station, a place for Heloise to remain safe while Abelard could figure out his next move; but convents were the traditional refuge of wives whose husbands had repudiated them, and Fulbert used the move as an excuse to take revenge. He sent hired thugs to Abelard’s lodgings in the middle of the night. They pinned the schoolmaster down, and castrated him. “Next morning,” Abelard writes, “the whole city gathered before my house, and . . . tormented me with their unbearable weeping and wailing.”3

  Probably the real crowd was smaller than in Abelard’s recollections, but he was a popular teacher, and the attack was a nine-day wonder. When the fuss had died down, both Abelard and Heloise entered monastic orders, he in the abbey of St. Denis near Paris, she taking orders at the convent of Argenteuil, some twenty-five miles away. Over the next two decades they saw each other perhaps twice; but they wrote letters constantly, their marriage held together only by words.

  At St. Denis, Abelard continued to study and teach, applying Greek logic to the doctrines of the Church. The first version of his Theologia argued that Plato’s philosophy of a “world soul” was actually a reference to the Holy Spirit; that through logic, any man could grasp the essence of the Trinity; that scripture was involucrum, inherently difficult and figurative, “fruitfully obscure” in a way that forced readers to use reason and dialectic as they wrestled with the meaning.4

  None of this was intended to destroy the faith. Like Anselm, Peter Abelard believed that truth would withstand Aristotle’s methods. But this alarmed his more traditionally minded brethren. When they accused him of endangering the doctrines of the Church, he offered to explain why his conclusions were true: “We take no account of rational explanation,” one opponent retorted, “nor of your interpretation in such matters; we recognize only the words of authority.”5

  7.1 Peter Abelard’s France

  In 1121, a church council at Soissons, attended by a papal legate, ordered Abelard to throw his Theologia into the fire. He obeyed, but he did not change his views on the value of reason and logic. For the next twenty years, Abelard wrote and taught, defending his orthodoxy even while he criticized the church’s reliance on too-simple truth. He revised the Theologia twice, coming up with its final form in 1135; he assembled a whole collection of quotations from the church fathers that contradicted each other into a work called Sic et Non (Yes and No); he wrote a series of dialogues about ethics between a Christian, a Jew, and a character called the Ancient Philosopher; the Collationes, in which the Ancient Philosopher shows a clear understanding of the Highest Good—despite having only natural law to guide him.6

  He was often accused of heterodoxy, potentially dangerous departures from orthodox, accepted understandings of the Christian faith. At least once, he was briefly imprisoned. But the help of powerful patrons, and the enthusiasm of his many students, kept him from out-and-out condemnation by the Church—until 1141, when the revision of the Theologia drew the attention of none other than Bernard of Clairvaux: venerable in character, conspicuous for learning, evangelist for the Second Crusade.

  The two men were polar opposites: Abelard determined to bring faith
and logic together, Bernard holding the authority of the Church above all. “He had an abhorrence of teachers who put their trust in worldly wisdom and clung too much to human argument,” Otto of Freising explains. When, in 1140, a local monk sent Bernard a letter highlighting Abelard’s most recent doctrinal explorations, Bernard agreed that the matter required investigation.7

  He asked Abelard to come and explain himself; Abelard instead appealed to the Bishop of Sens, and then to the pope. Probably he believed that his own skill in argumentation would help him to triumph. But it was exactly this skill that frightened his traditionalist opponents: “Peter Abelard,” wrote Bernard, in his own appeal to the pope, “believes he can comprehend by human reason all that is God.”8

  To give Abelard a pass was to accept the categories of Aristotle; and accepting Aristotelian thought might well throw into doubt the entire authority structure of the Christian church. In 1141, the papal court agreed with Bernard. Abelard was to be imprisoned and condemned to perpetual silence. The sentence doomed him to pass the rest of his life without words: confined in a monastery, forbidden to speak, making his wants known only with signs.

  In the eyes of his followers, the silencing of Abelard was a tacit acknowledgement that Aristotelian thought was both powerful and true. “The high priests and Pharisees convened an assembly,” wrote his student Berengar of Poitiers, using a New Testament metaphor for Bernard and the papal court, “and said: What should we do, since this man speaks of many wonderful things? If we let him go on like this, all will believe him.” But for Bernard of Clairvaux, authority had been properly reasserted; the old truths preserved, the old verities reaffirmed.9

  The penalty was never actually enforced. Abelard, who had been suffering already from the illness that would kill him, took shelter at the monastery of Cluny and was in the middle of writing a lengthy self-defense when he died. The abbot of Cluny, known as Peter the Venerable, exercised the authority given to him “in virtue of [his] office” and declared Abelard absolved of all his sins. He sent Abelard’s coffin to Heloise, now abbess of the Paraclete convent.