The House of Wisdom (26 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.]”
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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.
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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 ensnare 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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.

That Robert and Hermann initially conceived their translation enterprise as an entryway to the
Almagest
was a testimony to the enormous gravitational pull that this as-yet-undigested work exerted on medieval Western thought. Such was its allure that just the rumored existence of Arabic copies in the Spanish libraries was enough to send Gerard of Cremona hurrying to see for himself. The most prolific figure among the translators of the second half of the twelfth century, Gerard remained in Spain to render into Latin more than seventy Arabic texts. Among his output was the original object of his intellectual desire: a Latin version of the
Almagest
. It proved by far the most popular edition among medieval scholars, and it was the first to be printed, appearing in Venice in 1515.
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A eulogy by Gerard’s disciples reflected the influence on their master of Ptolemy’s great work: “[He] trained from childhood at centers of philosophical study and had come to a knowledge of all of this that was known to the Latins; but for the love of the
Almagest
, which he could not find at all among the Latins, he went to Toledo; there, seeing the abundance of books in Arabic on every subject, and regretting the poverty of the Latins in these things, he learned the Arabic language, in order to be able to translate. In this way, combining both languages and science, … he passed on the Arabic literature in the manner of the wise man who, wandering through a green field, links up a crown of flowers, made from not just any, but the prettiest; to the end of his life, he continued to transmit to the Latin world (as if to his own beloved heir) whatsoever books he could … as accurately and as plainly as he could.”
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Among the many translations attributed to Gerard and his team were medical textbooks and surgical manuals, including Avicenna’s great
Canon of Medicine; The Calendar of Cordoba;
and assorted treatises on alchemy and chemistry, astrology, astronomy, mathematics, optics, and the science of weights.
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In an important shift away from the purely technical concerns of the old French cathedral schools that shaped many of the earliest translations, Gerard and his colleagues began to expand the West’s intellectual horizons through the introduction of a broader range of Greek philosophy and natural science, as well as the writings of the Arab philosophers and scientists themselves.

If the old ways were represented by the narrow demands of the cathedral curriculum based on the seven liberal arts, an approach that left no real place for study of the natural universe, then this Arab-inspired learning offered Christian thinkers new avenues for exploring the world around them. Introducing Avicenna’s philosophical work
On the Soul
, the Jewish scholar and co-translator Avendauth made the case for this radical departure: “Latin readers will know with certainty something hitherto unknown, namely whether the soul exists, what are its nature and its qualities according to its essence and its activity, and this will be proved by true reasons … Here, then, is a book translated from the Arabic, whose author, you must know, has collected everything that Aristotle said in his book about the soul, sense-perception and the sensible, the intellect and the intelligible.”
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