“Once, when Frederick, Emperor of Rome, the ever-illustrious, had reflected long in accordance with the order he had himself established on the differences of the whole earth, what they are and how they appear on, over, in and under the earth, he then sent secretly for me, Michael the Scot, the most faithful of his astrologers, and laid a number of questions before me, secretly, as it pleased him to do, about the foundations of earth and the marvels thereof, speaking as follows:
‘My dearest Master, we have often and in divers ways heard question and answer from one and another about the heavenly bodies, about sun and moon and the fixed stars, about the elements, the world soul, about heathen and Christian peoples and other created things that exist on and in the earth, such as plants and metals. Yet we have heard naught of those secrets which delight the mind that is wedded to wisdom: about Paradise, Purgatory, Hell, the foundations and the wonders of the world. Therefore we beg thee by thy love of wisdom and thy loyalty to our throne to explain to us the structure of the earth.
How is the earth fastened above the abyss of space?
And how is this abyss fastened beneath the earth?
Is there aught else that bears the earth save air and water?
Or does the earth stand fast of itself?
Or does it rest on the heavens below it?
And how many heavens are there?
Who is their director?
Who mainly inhabit the heavens?
How far is one heaven distant from another by our measure?
And if there be many heavens what is there out beyond the last?
By how much is one heaven greater than another?
In which heaven is God Substance, that is in his divine majesty, and in what wise doth he sit upon the throne of heaven?
And in what wise is he accompanied by the angels and the saints?
And what do the angels and the saints do uninterruptedly in the presence of God?
Likewise tell us: How many Hells are there?
Who are the spirits who dwell in them?
And by what names are they called?
Where is Hell, and Purgatory where?
And where the Heavenly Paradise? Under the earth? Over the earth? In the earth?
And what is the difference between the souls who go to Hell and the spirits which fell from Heaven? And how many torments are there in Hell?
And does one soul know another in the next life? And can a soul return to this life to speak or to show itself to anyone?
And what of this: that when the soul of a living man passes over into that other life, naught can give it power to return, neither first love nor even HATE as if naught had ever happened? Or does it seem that the soul careth naught for what is left behind, whether it be blessed or whether it be damned?’”
These questions at once recall the apparently similar questions of the Scholastics; but theirs are mostly pure mental gymnastics of this type: how would mankind have spread over the earth according to God’s wish if there had been no Fall? or whether at the Resurrection the toothless will again grow teeth and the bald grow hair? Frederick II, however, asks about the appearance of that other world. He directs the same practical curiosity to the conditions of that other world as dictated his questions to the messengers of Muslim princes about the conditions of their various foreign countries. The kingdom of God was for him just such another. The thought of the future life, which disturbed Frederick’s contemporaries to the core and hunted terrified men to penances and flagellations, was to Frederick in the most amazing way simply an innocent object of knowledge and “a delight of the mind.” He inquires because the tectonics of the world-structure seems to him immeasurably interesting; he longs to know just how God sits upon his throne, because he must sit in like fashion; it is unquestionably useful to him as a judge to know the punishments of Hell; and the statesman in him enquires for practical reasons about the precedence of saints, angels and spirits.
Mysticism is entirely foreign to this method of approach, which seeks objective representation. There is not a trace of any personal, emotional interest, nor in the imperial soul the faintest shadow of anxiety. Eternal bliss, everlasting contemplation of God offer no allurements: “What do the angels do uninterruptedly in the presence of God?” That other question, whether a return to this life is not possible “not even for hate,” corresponds to the Emperor’s saying on the defection of a certain town: “If I had one foot in Paradise I would withdraw it to take vengeance on Viterbo!” Dante answered all these questions soberly and practically too, but interested in every fibre in that world which he never ceased to picture tangibly and visibly to himself day and night. His questions are often the same as Frederick’s.
People tell of Frederick II, himself the master of so many tongues, that he was anxious to discover by research what the primeval human speech had been. He, therefore, had a number of infants reared by nurses who were most strictly forbidden to speak to them. “He wanted to discover whether the children could speak Hebrew, or Greek, or Latin, or Arabic as the original of all languages, or whether they would speak the speech of their parents who had borne them.” The experiment failed, for the children died. This problem also attracted Dante, who deals with it in his treatise on popular speech. Dante also, in another little essay, de Aqua et terra, discusses just such hydrological phenomena as Frederick II had cross-examined Michael Scot about. “How does it come,” asked the Emperor, “that sea-water is so salt, and that in many places far from the sea salt water is found and in other places sweet water, although they all derive from the living sea? And how comes it that sweet waters are often spewed out by the earth and often drop from stones and trees, like grape vines when they are cut in spring? And how is it that many waters are sweet and mild and sparkling clear, and many are wild and others again viscous and thick? We marvel much about all these things although we know long since that all waters come from the sea and that they flow through lands and caves of many kinds, returning to the sea which is the bed and womb of all the streaming waters.” Dante and his age shared this conception of the unity of all earthly waters.
This “much marvelling” of the Emperor’s is the vital point. Things which for centuries everybody had seen and accepted as facts challenged him to curious enquiry. When he was staying at a place like Pozzuoli or Montepulciano he immediately wanted to know all about the remarkable springs. “Where do the salt and bitter springs come from, which in many places gush forth with violence, and the foul-smelling waters which are found in many baths and pools. Do they spring up themselves? Do they come from elsewhere? And those waters which in some places are hot or at least very warm and sometimes even boiling as if they had been in a vessel over a fire? Has the earth a hole in its centre, or is it a solid body like a living stone?” The world was, as it were, a new discovery to him fraught with questions. He must have observed the winds on his crusading voyage: “Whence comes the wind which blows from different parts of the circle of the earth?” He probably means the regular wind-currents. Volcanoes are another subject of inquiry: “Whence comes the fire which the earth vomits forth both out of plains and mountain tops? Smoke too appears now there, now here. Where is it generated and what causes it to burst forth? We see it in many parts of Sicily and near Messina, as in Etna, Vesuvius, the Lipari islands and Stromboli.” He is probably thinking of submarine volcanoes when he asks: “How does it come that such flaming fire appears to issue not only from the earth but in many parts of the Indian Sea?”
Other things that occupied the Emperor’s mind were the secret forces inherent in matter, in things themselves, forces which Frederick II was so skilful in liberating in his State. He had a particular love for precious stones that was not unconnected with their magic properties, and he would purchase them even when the treasury was exhausted. Prester John was said to have given him wonderful stones; and he was brought the legendary jewels from the crown of the Babylonian dragon which a fisherman had found. He was intimately acquainted with the magnet
ic needle and its mysterious power, that wonderful instrument of which Brunetto Latini wrote at the end of the century to Guido Cavalcanti: “The seafarer can steer correctly thanks to this magnet, but for the present he must use it secretly… for no shipmaster would dare to employ him lest he be suspected of witchcraft. Sailors would refuse to serve on the ship if they knew that their captain had in his possession such inventions of the devil.” Michael Scot had minutely instructed the Emperor about the different properties of minerals and metals, a lore which verged on alchemy, an art by no means unknown at court. He learned, for instance, that quicksilver, the wonderful argentum vivum, makes a man deaf if dropped into his ear. He also got Michael Scot to teach him the properties of herbs and drugs (the Botany of Dioscorides was known in Sicily) and the wonderful qualities of lakes and rivers, and he sent special messengers to Norway to investigate the petrifying properties of a certain spring.
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Frederick’s great resource in all his questionings was the enormous work of Michael Scot, which was not only an astronomical, astrological encyclopaedia, but a compendium of all the secret sciences. It was based in many points on dangerous sources, a Liber perditionis animae et corporis for instance, which contained the names, dwelling-places and powers of the demons, and the Liber auguriorum of which Michael Scot (otherwise a most obedient son of the Church) writes that he has seen and owned the book although the Roman Church had banned it. His work does not neglect the symbolism of numbers and their mystic values: the number seven rules the world, for seven is the number of the planets, metals, arts, colours, tones and smells. Everywhere we detect him striving to relate everything in the Cosmos according to law to everything else. Michael Scot treats of the music of the spheres and expounds en passant the old musical doctrines of Boëthius, and the newer ones of Guido of Arezzo; on another occasion he explains the calendar. His immense astrological and astronomical knowledge he owes not only to the Almagest and to al Fargani, but much also to the ancients, to the obscure Scholia of Germanicus, for instance, in which again Nigidius and Fulgentius, Hyginus, Pliny, Martianus Capella and Aratus are included. Michael Scot took over the star pictures of the ancient Scholia, and these astrological figures of Mars and Jupiter, the Archer and the Centaur, which followed the ancient representations, exercised in their turn an influence on Renaissance painting, as can be demonstrated from Giotto’s frescoes at Padua. For his astrology Michael Scot draws largely on the Arabs, above all on Albumazar in whom more ancient works were collected, Hermes, Dorotheus, the Babylonian Teucer and also Indians and Persians. In short, at the imperial court all the superstitions of the late Roman empire, a prey as it had been to the stream of oriental influences, came to life again, just as Gnostic teaching reawakened amongst the heretics of this same period.
Frederick knew all these things, or had learned in conversation all that was worth knowing about them. “O fortunate Emperor!”—wrote Michael Scot—“I verily believe if ever a man in this world could escape death by his learning, thou wouldest be the one. …” Frederick’s knowledge must have been stupendous. His mind enbraced every line of culture in the contemporary world: Spanish, Provençal, French, Roman, Italian, Arab, Greek and Jew. Add to this his knowledge of tongues, of jurisprudence, of ancient literature, of Roman educational literature and the literature of Scholasticism, whose methods were entirely familiar to him as his Falcon Book shows. His contemporaries, amazed and fearful, called him STUPOR MUNDI.
More admirable even than the fulness of his knowledge was the fact that with it all the Emperor never for a moment lost his clarity of vision. Even in scientific matters he knew exactly what things were of importance for research. He was himself at home in the mysterious twilight of the prophets and stargazers and could not value their sphere too highly as, in a certain sense, a training ground. His own aims, however, were far too simple and straightforward to be understood by any of these over-learned folk. He depended only on first hand ocular observation. “No certainty comes by hearsay” was one of his maxims. He acted up to it. To let people know the Emperor’s methods he once sent mutilated and blinded conspirators on a tour of all countries, for “the sight of the eyes makes more impression on men than the hearing of the ear.” He by no means despised the mental training that served to sharpen the sight. An Arab scholar Shahabu’d Din has preserved in an essay on Optics: Attentive Observation of What the Eye Perceives, some questions of the Emperor’s. He asked why Canopus looked larger at his rising than at his zenith; why eyes afflicted with cataract could see black streaks and spots; why a lance plunged in water should appear broken. Deceptions of the eye had a disturbing importance for the man who relied preponderantly on visual observation.
The sense in which Frederick believed that knowledge was dependent on seeing is clear from his laws about doctors. The Constitutions of Melfi lay down: “Since the science of medicine cannot be mastered without a preliminary knowledge of logic, we command that none shall study medicine who has not first studied logic for at least three years.” All medical students of Salerno were obliged to devote five years to reading Hippocrates and Galen concurrently with their surgical and anatomical studies, for the purposes of which corpses were on occasion placed at their disposal. After they had passed their examination the Emperor did not grant them an appointment as doctor until “they had practised for a full year beside an experienced physician.” After that they became state officials. The apothecaries were also state officials, and were obliged to study physics for one year. The Emperor himself had a very exact knowledge of anatomy, both animal and human, and of medicine. The Arabs had a great admiration for his medical knowledge, and he quotes Hippocrates in his Falcon Book. Michael Scot wrote a medical treatise, so also did Master Theodore, who, when he was instructed to work out a new scheme of dietetics, wrote to the Emperor: “Your Majesty has commanded me to prescribe certain rules for the preservation of your health… but you are long since in possession of that most ancient letter from the ‘Secrets’ of Aristotle, which he sent to the Emperor Alexander when the latter asked to be instructed about the health of the body. All that your Majesty desires to know is completely contained in that letter.” A certain Adam of Cremona also worked out medical instructions for the Emperor. And in Italy for many a day powders, prescriptions and healing lotions passed under Frederick’s name. In addition to anatomy and medicine the Emperor sought to master the science of human physiognomy. At his request Michael Scot compiled from Arab-Hellenistic sources an essay on Physiognomies which forms the third part of his great Handbook. In the dedication he assures the Emperor that with this knowledge in mind a ruler may know the vices and virtues of his entourage as surely as if he were himself in their skins.
Slowly people were progressing from mental blinking to physical seeing. Seeing, observing, exploring and researching into Nature and her laws became a passion with Frederick II. The innumerable anecdotes, the countless questions all betray the same craving to explore the living newly-discovered world, all disclose the same passionate curiosity concerning the laws of cause and effect, the how and the why of every sort of life. He shares this passion for knowledge, this curiosity, with Leonardo da Vinci, to whom Nietzsche compares him: he at the beginning, Leonardo at the end of the same epoch. Where mere observation was insufficient Frederick II proceeded to scientific experiment, which, like every attempt at experiment, seemed to the Middle Ages abhorrent or insane. They tell that he was anxious to discover which of two men had better digested his food, the one who had rested after his meal or the other who had taken exercise: he cut them open to see. To ascertain the length of a fish’s life Frederick inserted a copper ring in a carp’s fin and set it free. The story of the “Diver” is told about Frederick. He made the man dive into the Faro to learn about sea animals and plants. He organised the most original experiments on his Apulian estates, where he bred horses and sought to improve the breed by importing Barbary mares. In Malta he established a camel-breeding station, not to mention his breedi
ng of hounds, poultry and pigeons. To study the chick’s emergence from the egg, the embryo’s position in the egg, etc., he built artificial incubating ovens. Having heard that ostrich eggs are hatched by the sun in hot sand he procured ostrich eggs from al Kamil and experienced people along with them, and tried to hatch them out in the heat of the Apulian summer. Al Kamil also sent him Indian cockatoos and pelicans, in return for which Frederick sent him presents of white peacocks and a polar bear. He tried to determine whether birds of prey detect their quarry by sight or smell. “We have often experimented in various ways. For when the falcons are completely blinded (by stitching the eyelids) they do not even detect the meat that is thrown to them, though nothing impedes their power of smell.” He was the first to institute systematic cultivation of game; he established close seasons, based on an accurate observation of the times of pairing and breeding, for which the animals of Apulia were supposed to have written him a letter of thanks. He had animal reservations in various parts of his kingdom, and the larger part of his menagerie, when not in actual attendance on him, was kept in Lucera. On occasion he would divide a number of captured cranes among his various castles. His large vivarium was symbolical. Close to Foggia he had a big marsh laid out with ponds and walled water-conduits which was alive with all descriptions of waterfowl. A fantastic picture—the great palace with its columns of marble and serpentine, with bronze and marble statues, the Emperor within attended by Moorish slaves and noble pages, visiting his pools to study pelicans, cranes, herons, wild geese and exotic marsh fowl!
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