The House of Wisdom

by Jonathan Lyons

  Al-Idrisi himself tells us that Roger’s Map of the World project was rooted not in ignorance on the part of the king but rather in a deep dissatisfaction with the works of the earlier Arab geographers, including The Book of Roads and Kingdoms and the accounts of al-Masudi. Roger had pored over these and many other texts in search of an understanding of “other lands, [and] their division into the seven climate zones upon which the scholars agree.” But, says al-Idrisi, the king did not find the information he sought in any scholarly work. “In fact, he found them to be rather simpleminded.”60

  Roger responded as would have al-Muqaddasi or any other self-respecting medieval Arab scholar: He collected more data and then sifted through the results in search of general trends and confirmed facts. Al-Idrisi recounts the king’s approach with his researchers: “They studied together, but did not find much extra knowledge from [other scholars] over what he found in the aforementioned work [of the Muslim geographers], and when he had convened with them on this subject he sent out into all his lands and ordered yet other scholars who may have been traveling around to come and asked them about their opinions both singly and collectively. But there was no agreement among them. However, where they agreed he accepted the information, but where they differed, he rejected it.”61

  According to al-Idrisi, this continued for fifteen years, until at last Roger was satisfied. He ordered the preliminary outlines of his Map of the World to be traced onto a special drawing board in accordance with the “opinion and consensus of the scholars.” Once the draft map’s “true description and pleasing form” was confirmed, the artisans began the laborious process of copying this prototype onto the large silver disk, in effect its final publication. Al-Idrisi says all that remained was the preparation of the hand-drawn sectional maps and the completion of his supporting text containing “the descriptions of the provinces and the appearance of their peoples, their dress and their adornments and the practicable roads and their mileage and farsangs [a traditional unit of measurement] and all the wonders of their lands as witnessed by travelers and mentioned by roaming writers and confirmed by narrators. Thus after each map we have entered everything we have thought necessary and suitable in its proper place in the book, as much as our knowledge and our ability will allow.”62

  By any standard, The Book of Roger was a monumental achievement, more than anything for the sheer scope of the project and its success in assembling the views of so many learned sources across so many fields of knowledge. It also helped enshrine the Arab scientific method that reached back to the work of the early Islamic jurists and theologians. Most of all, it showcased the glories of Arab geography, a field in which the Muslim scholars greatly surpassed their Greek, Persian, and Hindu predecessors. This collaboration between the Muslim scholar and his charismatic Christian patron brought the Arab tradition to the very crossroads of the known world. As a Mediterranean power, Roger’s kingdom of Sicily and southern Italy maintained vital trade, diplomatic, and military relations with all the important states of East and West. From there, The Book of Roger, with its potent mix of ancient and modern traditions, was well placed to shape emerging Christian conceptions of the outside world.

  The Book of Roger enjoyed a long shelf life. Al-Idrisi’s work took special root in North Africa, where a family of Tunisian cartographers specialized in sophisticated navigational charts that incorporated many of his findings. Traces of his maps can also be found in Europe’s emerging tradition of portolan charts, navigational aids and coastal maps of considerable detail and accuracy. An abridged Arabic version of al-Idrisi’s masterpiece was printed in the West in 1592, one of the earliest secular Muslim works produced by Rome’s academic Medici Press and a sign of the book’s enduring importance. A Latin translation appeared in Paris twenty-seven years later, but the original text was credited only to an anonymous “Nubian geographer.”

  In one of those odd footnotes to literary history, Edgar Allan Poe invokes this same Nubian geographer and the Sea of Darkness in his tale of nature’s overwhelming power and fury, “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” dated 1841.63 At the outset, Poe’s narrator recalls peering warily down from the heights of a craggy Norwegian cliff: “I looked dizzily, and beheld a wide expanse of ocean, whose waters wore so inky a hue as to bring at once to my mind the Nubian geographer’s account of the Mare Tenebrarum [the Sea of Darkness].” A French scholarly translation of The Book of Roger was produced in 1840 with an eye to improving contemporary Western knowledge of the world, particularly that of Africa, which was just emerging as a prize quarry in Europe’s great colonial expansion.64

  Roger II died at age fifty-eight in early 1154, shortly after al-Idrisi’s text was completed. One spiteful churchman, no doubt reflecting popular gossip that this Arabized king kept a harem, tells us: “He himself surrendered to fate, overcome by early old age, both worn down by his immense efforts and more devoted to sexual activity than the body’s good health requires.”65 The more sympathetic archbishop of Salerno, Romuald, on the other hand, recalled a man “large of stature, corpulent, leonine of face, somewhat hoarse of voice; wise, far-seeing, careful, subtle of mind, great in counsel, preferring to use his intelligence rather than force.”66 Whatever Roger’s personality, it is clear that the king’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge, not to mention his patronage of al-Idrisi and his own deep involvement with The Book of Roger and the great Map of the World, comprise a legacy worthy of the tradition of the early Abbasid caliphs, such as al-Mansur and al-Mamun. This new hunger for the latest in Arab learning, still on the margins of European intellectual life, also fueled the pilgrimage to the East of Roger II’s intrepid contemporary, Adelard of Bath.

  PART III

  Al-Zuhr/Midday

  Chapter Five

  THE FIRST MAN OF SCIENCE

  NO ONE KNOWS where Adelard learned Arabic—perhaps in Syracuse, on the once-Muslim island of Sicily, perhaps only later in Antioch itself. Before setting out for the East, he had asserted the common medieval notion that completely mastering the subject of grammar would ultimately give the reader access to any text in any tongue. He also noted the advantages of studying individual languages, suggesting he was well prepared to succeed at such an undertaking himself.1 Adelard tells us that he spent approximately seven years in and around the crusader lands able to communicate effectively with local scholars, something that would have required considerable facility with Arabic. Along the way, he mentions various Arab mentors who guided him in his research, and he worries aloud whether he may have attended so many lectures that they have blunted his memory. Among his teachers was a master of anatomy, an “old man of Tarsus,” in southern Asia Minor, not far from Antioch. His instructor, an adept at advanced Arab medicine, taught him sophisticated dissection techniques, including how to immerse a cadaver in running water to gently wear away the soft flesh and expose the body’s intricate networks of blood vessels and nerves.

  The path Adelard traced to Antioch is almost as obscure as the course of his language studies. He provides only a handful of clues about his wanderings in search of the studia Arabum, leaving much to be reconstructed from scattered hints in his books and translations and a few obscure references from fellow scholars. In 1109, Adelard deposited his nephew and other students then in his charge at Laon, where he left them to the “insecurity of French opinions.” Almost immediately the trail goes cold, until he resurfaces five years later in the principality of Antioch, huddled on the “trembling bridge” at Mamistra during the earthquake. Given his earlier visit to the archbishop of Syracuse, memorialized in On the Same and the Different, it seems likely that he returned to Sicily and used it as his jumping-off point to the East. The island was linked to Antioch by close family ties between their respective Norman rulers, making communications, travel, and trade relatively easy.

  At the time, Antioch was just beginning to emerge as an important center for the translation of Arabic texts into Latin, particularly in the field of medicine, where Muslim sci
ence was second to none. Traders from the Italian city-state of Pisa, who had earlier helped ferry the crusaders to the Holy Land in exchange for booty and territory, now wielded enormous influence in Antioch. They controlled their own quarter in the very center of the city and the whole of the nearby port of Latakia. As a result of these and other commercial and political links around the eastern Mediterranean, Pisa found itself to be a vital hub in the spread of Arab wisdom. Arabic texts seized by conquering Christian armies around the region swelled the book bazaars, transforming the city into something of an entrepôt of Muslim science. Antioch’s Pisan quarter bordered on the monastery of St. Paul, a Benedictine institution that surely would have welcomed Adelard, whose father, Fastrad, and mentor, Bishop John, were both prominent members of the same order back in Bath.

  Like Adelard, the Italian translator and scholar Stephen of Pisa—sometimes known as Stephen the Philosopher—soon made his way to Antioch to learn from the Muslims. There he translated a prominent medical encyclopedia, The Royal Book, by Ali ibn al-Abbas al-Majusi, known in the West as Haly Abbas. This work, dating from the tenth century and comprising ten chapters on medical theory and another ten chapters on clinical practice, was already widely used across the Muslim world. Stephen’s Latin version quickly became a European standard as well. Stephen begins chapter eight, on medical practice, with a personal note: “… The translation from Arabic into Latin of Stephen the disciple of philosophy. He wrote the copy himself and completed it in the year from the passion of our Lord 1127, on Saturday, November the third, at Antioch. Thanks be to God, the beginning and end of things.”2

  To accompany the text, Stephen fashioned his own glossary of Arabic and Greek medical terms, with some Latin equivalents—a work so valuable that it was meticulously copied and recopied by hand in the West for hundreds of years and even printed centuries later, during the Renaissance. Stephen himself was apparently less impressed with his own handiwork; he was not a physician and instead considered himself a “disciple of philosophy.” Next time, he promises, he will translate something from among “all the secrets of philosophy that lie hidden in the Arabic tongue.”3 Medicine, he notes, is but the lowest rung of the philosopher’s art, but one has to begin with the needs of the body before addressing the improvement of the soul.4

  While Stephen at first concentrated on matters of the lowly human body, Adelard reached for the heavens. As a young student in France, he had confidently predicted that the knowledge available in the Arab East could help cure the ills of the West—a decidedly unorthodox view in the era of the anti-Muslim Crusades. But not even Adelard could have anticipated what he would find in the studia Arabum. Among his trophies were the geometric system of Euclid; an elaborate Arab table of the movements of the stars; techniques for using that powerful computer, the astrolabe; several major works of Arab astrology; and a book of alchemy revealing ways to dye leather, tint glass, and produce green pigment—Adelard’s favorite color. The man from Bath plunged headfirst into the world of astronomy, philosophy, and magic.

  In all, about a dozen surviving works can be traced directly to the restless Englishman. The scope of his interests is breathtaking, from the royal art of falconry to applied chemistry, from geometry to mathematical astronomy and cosmology—the text often written in the accessible style of the natural-born teacher and raconteur. Adelard’s works also offer a useful window onto the state of Western borrowings from the Arabs, for his original works can be neatly broken down into those completed before his intellectual encounter with the East and those that followed it.

  Upon his return to Bath, Adelard found himself besieged by friends and family, all eager to learn of his seven years abroad. “Among those paying their calls was a certain nephew of mine, who, in investigating the causes of things, was tying them in knots rather than unraveling them. He urged me to put forward some new item of the studies of the Arabs,” Adelard recounts.5 The result is Questions on Natural Science, a series of queries and responses on what the classical authors call natural philosophy. The Western-educated nephew does the asking, and the learned Adelard, this time speaking for the Arabs, responds. “This is how the causes of things work,” the well-traveled scholar declares at the outset, in what might serve as the motto for his long career as a scientist and scholar. “So let us start from the lowest objects and end with the highest.”6

  Among the first Arabic texts to capture Adelard’s imagination was a classic work on tilasm, or the art of “talismans”—elaborate charms thought to invoke celestial influence—horoscopes, and astrological images by Thabit ibn Qurra, one of the leading lights of medieval science. Thabit ibn Qurra was a member of the star-worshipping Sabean sect, whose religious practices engendered a close affinity for astronomy, astrology, and mathematics. The Sabeans were also well grounded in Greek philosophy. According to Arab tradition, Thabit was a former money changer in the bazaars of Harran, with an impressive facility for languages. He caught the eye of a prominent Baghdad aristocrat and scholar, who arranged for him to study and work at the House of Wisdom. While the Sabeans were viewed with suspicion by many Muslims, the sect’s advanced Greek learning and invaluable skills afforded them a considerable measure of influence and status during the early Abbasid years.

  The talented Thabit flourished in the learned environs of Baghdad, and he went on to serve as royal astrologer in the late ninth century. One of the empire’s great scholars and linguists, Thabit revised and corrected Arabic versions of the Almagest and other Greek classics and produced original works on number theory, calculus, and mechanics. He also wrote several texts on the philosophical and religious views of his fellow Sabeans and was regarded among the Arab scholars as an expert on talismans.7 In the preface to his own translation of Thabit’s text on magic, the twelfth-century Latin scholar John of Seville suggests that Adelard, the only other Westerner to have seen the original Arabic work, procured a copy while in Antioch: “This book, then, I, with the help of God’s spirit, obtained from my Master—a book which no Latin other than a certain Antiochene, who once obtained a part of it, ever had.” That “certain Antiochene” is none other than Adelard of Bath, who earlier published an abridged version of the same text.8

  Where others feared the influence of Saracen sorcery, Adelard celebrated the notion that man might aspire to understand and even conquer nature. He also directly linked the practice of magic to other scientific endeavors, noting that the study of talismans first requires the mastery of astronomy and astrology. “Whoever is skilled in geometry and philosophy but without experience of the science of the stars is useless; for the science of the stars is, of all the arts, both the most excellent in its subject matter and the most useful because of the effects of talismans,” Adelard tells us in his own version of Thabit ibn Qurra’s work.9 The text, known as The Book of Talismans, includes incantations for driving away mice and techniques for rekindling love between husband and wife. There is even a talisman for ridding a town of scorpions. First, an image of a scorpion is fashioned from metal while Scorpio is in the ascendant. Next, the name of this constellation and other astronomical details are inscribed on the talisman. Finally, it is buried in the place to be protected—or better yet, in all four corners of the place—while one recites, “This is the burial of it and of its species, that it may not come to that one and to that place.”10

  Adelard leavened his translation with a liberal use of Arabic phrases, giving it a mysterious appeal in a Latin world starved for both novelty and basic information. In the prescription for a wife seeking to regain her husband’s affections, he spells out the required incantation: “O fount of honor, joy and light of the world! Mix together the loves of these two people, o spirits, using your knowledge of mixing, and being helped toward this end by the greatest power and the might of al-malik al-quddus wa al-hayah al-da ’ima” an Arabic phrase that Adelard translates as “the king, the holy and eternal life.”11 This noble appeal to God or his intercessors, not to demons, is in keeping with Islamic
tradition and sets it apart from the notion of black magic in Christian Europe.12 At one point, Adelard gives us a rare hint as to what might have compelled a young man from the English West Country to push deep into uncharted intellectual territory, alone in a strange and distant land. The practitioner of magic, he writes, must remain focused on the task at hand, and he should always act with confidence. For “lack of hope is the mother of hesitation, and hesitation is the mother of ineffectiveness.”13

  Under the influence of Thabit ibn Qurra and other such thinkers, Adelard developed a lifelong fascination with the occult as part and parcel of his science. As far as many of the Muslim scholars were concerned, astrology and magic fit right in with astronomy, medicine, chemistry, and weather forecasting, a convention that Adelard did much to popularize among early Western scientists. Arab doctors, for example, routinely consulted the stars to identify the best time to draw blood or conduct surgery, matching parts of a patient’s body with an astrological map of the heavens. This system was first propagated by ancient Greek medical practice: Aries was associated with the head, and one continued down the body and around the signs of the zodiac to Pisces, which corresponded to the feet.14 The University of Bologna, one of the medieval West’s great centers of medical training, had a special master dedicated to teaching future doctors how to assess the influence of the stars on the human body.15

  Adelard, it seems, also dabbled in alchemy, an important incubator of early experimental science and the forerunner to modern chemistry. Although its origins lay in the philosophical investigation into the nature of substance and reality, much of medieval alchemy came more and more to comprise specific techniques for manipulating materials with solvents and reactive agents or creating metal alloys and dyes, all basic processes that would one day find a home in the chemist’s laboratory. Today, the word alchemy mostly conjures up the secretive, even mystical, pursuit of ways to create gold from lesser metals. One surviving medieval reference ascribes to Adelard a lost twelfth-century manuscript of alchemical recipes and techniques, known as A Little Key to Drawing. An extant version—without attribution to Adelard or anyone else—features a series of instructions for refining gold and silver, working in precious metals, tinting glass, and coloring leather, many dating back to the alchemical traditions of Hellenistic Egypt. In all, it presents 382 chapters, or recipes, about one third of which appear to be relatively recent additions.16 One salient feature of A Little Key to Drawing is its complete lack of reliance on Latin sources for the central material—there is, for example, no hint of the canonical works of Vitruvius in its architectural sections—making it one of the earliest examples of technology transfer to the Christian West.17