The House of Wisdom

by Jonathan Lyons

  The Muslim conquest had already brought the Arabic language to the western edge of Europe, and it quickly became the accepted medium of high culture and often of everyday life within and among the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian communities of al-Andalus. As early as the ninth century, the bishop of Cordoba bemoaned the fact that the Arabic tongue was endangering the survival of Latin, the language of the Catholic Church. He was aghast at the alarming rate at which his fellow Christians were devouring Arabic books and “building up great libraries of them at enormous cost … Hardly one can write a passable Latin letter to a friend, but innumerable are those who can express themselves in Arabic and can compose poetry in that language with greater art than the Arabs themselves.”10

  A handful of anti-Arab conservatives launched a campaign to incite Christians to slander the Prophet Muhammad in public, in the hopes that severe treatment of the militants would provoke a rebellion. A small number of these so-called Cordoba Martyrs were in fact executed, but only after Muslim and Christian leaders tried without success to defuse the crisis peacefully. The movement never caught fire, and good relations among the faiths were restored. Yet the bishop’s deepest fears were not without foundation: The widespread use of Arabic did help break Latin’s stranglehold on Europe’s literary and learned speech, paving the way for the rise of the vernacular languages and the great works of “national” writers.11 These include Cervantes, who uses the device of a lost Arab “original” author, Sidi ben Hamed, to frame his story of Don Quixote; Dante, whose description of Paradise and the Inferno almost certainly spring from Islamic models then in European circulation; and Shakespeare.

  Andalusi innovations in Arabic love poetry spread into Christian Spain and southern France through diplomacy, intermarriage, war, and other contacts across the sectarian divide. The institution of the qiyan, a singing girl not unlike the Japanese geisha, carried on the tradition of Arabic lyrical poetry and song in the courts of al-Andalus. These slave girls presented their masters and patrons with an image of the beloved as capricious and often unattainable, in keeping with the erotic sensibility of the day: “For both by training and by innate instinct, her nature is to set up snares and traps for her victims,” sighs one ninth-century Arab writer on the subject of the qiyan.12

  These singers at times were given to Christian princes as diplomatic gifts or comprised part of a marriage dowry. They were also taken in battle. The seizure of the Muslim city of Barbastro by a force of Normans and knights from southern France in 1064 saw the capture of hundreds of these highly trained slave girls, many of whom ended up as entertainers and concubines in the royal households of southern France. One beneficiary was the young William IX of Aquitaine—often called the first troubadour, or lyric poet in a “modern” European tongue—who grew up surrounded by the songs and verses of the Arabs.13 Readers of troubadour poetry will have no difficulty recognizing the recurrent themes—the lover’s total submission to his beloved, the use of secret signs and intermediaries, the rapture induced by silent suffering and self-restraint—that run through the older repertoire of the qiyan.14

  The geographer Ibn Hawqal, who visited Cordoba in 948, declared that the imperial capital “has no equal in the Maghrib, and hardly any in Egypt, Syria or Mesopotamia, for the size of its population, its extent, the space occupied by its markets, the cleanliness of its streets, the architecture of its mosques, the number of its baths and caravanserais [merchants’ inns].”15 Although figures vary wildly, the city’s population has been estimated at more than one hundred thousand, roughly on par with the Byzantine capital Constantinople but towering over anything at the time in Christian Europe.

  Other contemporary accounts say the caliphs maintained a library whose catalog alone filled forty-four large volumes. The collection was so big—commonly put at four hundred thousand volumes—that it took five days just to transport the works of poetry during one of the royal library’s periodic moves to bigger quarters. Street lamps, paved city roadways, and other civic amenities were plentiful, seven hundred years before London could boast of any form of public illumination. Successful cataract operations, using instruments fashioned from sharpened fish bones, were carried out in the mosque by the city’s surgeons.16

  There were at least two fields where Andalusi men of science at times outdid their learned counterparts in the East. The first was the down-to-earth subject of agronomy, along with the related disciplines of botany, pharmacology, astrology, and meteorology. The second was the more rarefied matter of Aristotle’s philosophy, encompassing cosmology, metaphysics, and elements of theology.

  A number of factors drove what might be termed a Green Revolution carried out by the Muslims of the Iberian Peninsula—some seemingly accidents of history, others intimately bound up with the nature and experience of the Arabs themselves. First, the science of agriculture received a big boost from the timely appearance in Spain of several key scientific works. The sudden arrival in the tenth century of a Greek medical masterpiece by Dioscorides, a diplomatic gift of the Byzantine emperor, sparked intensive interest in the pursuit of botany and pharmacology. Also influential was the Calendar of Cordoba, a uniquely Andalusi work that combined a wealth of Arab astronomical tradition and intricate calculations with agricultural information, weather predictions, and even key elements of the religious calendar of Spain’s large Arabic-speaking Christian community, the Mozarabs, from the Arabic for “those who follow the ways of the Arabs.” Emblematic of the multi-confessional nature of al-Andalus, where Muslim rulers were generally tolerant of their Jewish and Christian subjects, one surviving example of the Calendar of Cordoba is written in standard Arabic but with Hebrew letters.17 Entries for March in one text include the vernal equinox, the coming of Easter, astronomical events predicted in the zij al-Sindhind, and a storm warning for late in the month: “The winds which blow now damage, by their violence, the early figs and the formation of fruits.”18

  Second, there was a pervasive desire on the part of the Andalusis to match the glories of the Muslim heartland and even to surpass them. In the fine art of cuisine, for example, this meant at the very least replicating the large variety of fruits, vegetables, and herbs featured in the classical Arab repertoire developed in the East. And that required significant advances in collecting, introducing, acclimatizing, and successfully raising crops historically unknown in Spain. Much of the basic research was assisted by the vogue among the rich and powerful for experimental and ornamental gardens, patterned after Munya al-Rusafa, the country estate of the first amir. In such surroundings, specialists could adapt imported plants to the local conditions and improve existing varieties, by means of grafting or other techniques.19

  The number of such “royal” gardens rose substantially in the early eleventh century, when the centralized caliphate collapsed and made way for dozens of petty kingdoms scattered across al-Andalus. The imperial capital never recovered from what the Arabs call the fitna, a state of social chaos. “Weep for the splendor of Cordoba,” laments the historian Ibn Idhari. “Fortune made her a creditor and demanded payment for the debt.”20 But this dispersal of power into small, atomized states created opportunities for scholars of all sorts, as the new generation of individual rulers and petty dynasts sought to imitate the caliphs of old and to outdo one another at the same time.21 With their political and military room to maneuver often circumscribed by internal weakness, as well as by treaty obligations with one another and with the Christians to the north, these so-called party kingdoms were left to fight it out in the cultural arena. Agronomists, poets, philosophers, and other court intellectuals were perhaps the only ones in al-Andalus to benefit directly from the fitna.

  The shrinking geography of Muslim Spain, under steady pressure from Christian expansionism, introduced an added element of fluidity to this game of royal patronage. The ruler of Seville, for example, eagerly snapped up one of al-Andalus’s leading agricultural authorities, Ibn Bassal, and appointed him director of the “Garden of the Sultan�
� after the fall of Toledo to the Christians forced the scholar and other members of the city-state’s Muslim intellectual elite to scatter.22 Seville soon emerged as the center of the science of agriculture, with much of the activity linked to the work of Ibn Bassal and his colleagues at the Garden of the Sultan.

  Andalusi treatises on agronomy typically open with chapters on the varying types of soil, water, and fertilizers, followed by sections on veterinary science, the cultivation of plants and the rearing of animals. Many include timetables or calendars of agricultural activity, combined with important meteorologic advice and associated astronomical techniques, folk traditions, and even magic.23 Perhaps the most remarkable extant work in the Seville tradition is the twelfth-century Anonymous Botanist. This treatise presents an ambitious attempt at the systematic classification of the plant kingdom along recognizably modern lines many centuries before the Western works of Cesalpinus and Linnaeus.24

  In contrast to the intellectual curiosity and cultural receptivity of the Arab world, the Christian West showed remarkably little interest in this Green Revolution. In the three regions of Western military success against the Muslims in the eleventh and twelfth centuries—Spain, Sicily, and the crusader states of the Near East—the agricultural innovations and crop introductions of the Arabs generally disappeared under the new European stewardship of the land. Christian peasants brought in to work the newly conquered territory were unable to master the skills needed to cultivate these specialized crops. This was aggravated further by the rigidity of the prevailing European feudal land system. Knowledge of vital irrigation techniques was also lost in the Arab retreat, and lower population densities created by the departure of Muslim refugees reduced economic incentives for intensive farming.25

  Instead, the Christians tended to rely on familiar but less valuable old crops, chiefly cereals and vines, which they farmed in the old ways. Later attempts to follow Arab examples frequently failed for lack of know-how or proper organization, or else produced crops that were substandard. In the early thirteenth century, Frederick II of Sicily had to send to the Middle East for Arab experts to help him revive what had once been, before his ancestors drove out many of the Muslims, a thriving sugarcane industry.26 It took centuries for Europe to demonstrate any real receptivity to the new crops, first as ornamental exotica and then as foodstuffs and industrial raw materials. Well into the late Renaissance, long after the last Muslims had been forcibly converted or expelled altogether, Spanish authorities had to translate an Arabic agronomy manual in order to get the most out of the land that was once al-Andalus.

  In Spain, practical obstacles to the effective adoption of Arab innovations were augmented by an almost insurmountable ideological barrier—the notion that the Christians had a sacred duty to expel the Muslims, extirpate all traces of their faith and culture, and liberate the land from these foreign invaders. This was not conquest, but “reconquest,” a divinely inspired return to the natural order of things, in which Spain was a strictly Catholic country, pure of blood and pure of heart. It was often called a Crusade, but the Spanish preferred the term Reconquista.

  It took time, but the Reconquista proved an unstoppable military and political force, steadily rolling back the Muslims over the centuries. Yet Catholic Spain, alone among the major Western states, found it almost impossible to benefit directly from the riches of Arab science that were left virtually on its doorstep. When Seville fell in 1248, the forces of the Christian Reconquista were unaware that the minaret of the city-state’s great mosque was also Europe’s first observatory, built under the supervision of the mathematician Jabir ibn Afiah. Unsure what to do with the towering structure, the conquerors turned it into a belfry.

  As the pace of the translation movement accelerated, aided by high-level patronage from church and state, the Muslims were helpless to prevent the appropriation of their cultural and intellectual heritage. In a sign of the frustration that this engendered in certain circles, one Muslim cleric from al-Andalus raged against his fellow believers for trafficking in Arabic texts. In an age when the modern practice of scholarly citation and other similar conventions were unheard of, it was easy for Arab ideas to be passed off as Western innovations. “You must not sell books of science to Jews and Christians,” warned Ibn Abdun, “… because it happens that they translate these scientific books and attribute them to their own people and to their bishops, when they are indeed Muslim works.”27

  Two of the most prominent early translators, the Englishman Robert of Ketton and the Slav Hermann of Carinthia, teamed up in Spain to pursue a course of reading and study that they hoped would enable them one day to master the complexities of the Almagest. Along the way, Hermann translated Albumazar’s Introduction to Astrology, taking up the complete version that Adelard had slighted in favor of the more basic Abbreviation, while Robert introduced the West to al-Khwarizmi’s science of algebra and produced the first Latin text on the Arab art of alchemy. The pair regularly sent their translations to colleagues in France, where the texts enriched the curricula of the old cathedral schools. Clearly, the two felt they were making progress as they worked their way painstakingly through the imposing body of Arab learning. At one point, Hermann writes of “the trappings and decorations which long vigils and most earnest labor had acquired for [us] from the depths of the treasures of the Arabs.”28 Elsewhere, Robert recommends they turn next to a “book concerning ratios, so that a clearer way to the Almagest (which is the principal goal of our study) might be open to us.”29

  But in 1142, this intellectual idyll was disrupted by the unexpected arrival from France of Peter the Venerable, the abbot of Cluny, which at its height boasted more than six hundred monasteries and about ten thousand monks.30 Peter approached the two scholars with an unusual commission—the first Latin translation of the Koran, as well as some other works on Muslim beliefs and practices. Neither Robert nor Hermann, working together somewhere in the vicinity of the Ebro River, had ever shown the slightest interest in religious questions. They were more than content to learn from the Muslim scientists and philosophers and to leave the crusading, whether military or literary, to others.

  The abbot was forced to shell out an exorbitant sum to entice the two men to drop their beloved scientific research for this religious commission. Yet, it seems, he lacked complete confidence that his Latin translation team was up to the job. “I found them in Spain around the Ebro, studying the art of astrology, and brought them to do this business by means of a large remuneration,” Peter later acknowledges in a letter to a church colleague. “In order that the translation should not lack the fullest fidelity, nor anything be taken away be deceit from our attention, I also added a Saracen to the Christian translators.”31

  Peter’s project provides an intriguing counterpoint to the church’s steadfast commitment to holy war, fifty years after Pope Urban II’s call to crusade. Why was it, Peter wondered, that the church was so intent on killing Muslims rather than on saving their souls by converting them to Christianity? But to do that, the West would first have to address its woeful ignorance about the faith. “A flame was enkindled in my meditation. I was indignant that the Latins did not know the cause of such perdition, and by reason of that ignorance could not be moved to put up any resistance; for there was no one who replied [to it] because there was no one who knew [about it.]”32

  Peter’s indictment of the church’s single-minded approach was also an indictment of the sad state of Latin learning, for he blamed the West’s general disinterest in foreign languages and foreign ways. He also noted that the Muslims were “clever and learned men” whose collections of books on the liberal arts and the study of nature had drawn Christian thinkers to Spain.33 Until Christian knowledge of the Muslims improved, any notion of intellectual crusade was unthinkable. It is not clear, however, whether Peter’s money was well spent. Attempting to formulate a more accurate picture of Islam, so that he might convert Muslims to his faith, Peter fell into some of the same traps that would e
nsnare many later Christian commentators who lacked the abbot’s resources.

  For example, he saw in reports of the Muslims’ practice of polygamy little more than a tactic to attract male followers and to satisfy Muhammad’s own carnal desires under the guise of religion. Islam’s sanction of an active sex life between husband and wife scandalized the abbot, who saw this as an open invitation to participate in “unnatural” practices. In the end, Peter could not decide if the Muslims were heretics or simply pagans. He was particularly disconcerted that the Muslims, like heretics, accepted Christ as a prophet while, like pagans, rejecting the church’s sacraments. In the end, he concluded that they were probably heretics, although he seemed less than convinced.34 But Peter was certain that Christendom must do more than pick up the sword; it must pick up the pen as well. “Whether one gives the Muslim misconception the shameful name of heresy or the vile name of paganism, we must act against it, that is, we must write.”35

  Robert, who took the lead in the translation of the Koran, was less than enthusiastic about the entire project. Writing in the preface, he says he was willing “to overlook in the meantime, my principal study of astronomy and geometry” to take part in the translation but was determined to return at once to his life’s work, one that would “penetrate … all the heavenly orbits, and their quantities, orders, and habits, and especially all manner of movement of the stars, their effects and natures.”36 Likewise, Hermann immediately resumed the life of a secular scholar. Still, the money, patronage, and prestige gained from the translation of the Koran, and the project’s backing by the powerful Cluniac order, helped establish the translation of Arabic works as an endeavor worthy of church patronage.37 That such support was forthcoming can be seen in the common practice of dedicating Latin renditions of Arab science and philosophy to leading clerics of the day.