BY THE TWELFTH CENTURY WESTERN EUROPEAN CULTURE HAD progressed to the point where scholars were no longer satisfied with the works of Graeco-Arabic science, but now began to look for translations directly from the Greek, searching for a deeper insight into the thought of the great philosophers and scientists of the classical and Hellenistic periods, particularly Aristotle and the great mathematical physicists and astronomers such as Euclid, Archimedes, and Ptolemy, for their own researches were taking them deeper into Aristotelianism as well as the use of mathematics in science.
A few translations from Greek to Latin had been done in Italy during the sixth century, most notably some logical works of Aristotle translated by Boethius. No further translations from Greek into Latin were done until the twelfth century, when the first cultural interactions began taking place between the Greek East and the Latin West, principally in Constantinople, where several Italian city-states had trading concessions, and in Norman Sicily.
The first important instance of such a cultural interchange occurred in 1136, during the reign of the Byzantine emperor John II Comnenus, when the Holy Roman Emperor Lothair sent a mission headed by Anselm, bishop of Havelberg and later archbishop of Ravenna, to Constantinople to discuss theological differences between the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches. After Anselm arrived in Constantinople he and his entourage went to the Pisan quarter on the Golden Horn to discuss theology with a group of Greek clerics headed by Nicetas, archbishop of Nicomedia. According to Anselm, “There were present not a few Latins, among them three wise men skilled in the two languages [Latin and Greek] and most learned in letters, mostly James a Venetian, Burgundio a Pisan, and the third, most famous among Greeks and Latins above all others for his knowledge of both literatures, Moses by name, an Italian from the city of Bergamo, and he was chosen by all to be an interpreter for both sides.”
The first of these scholars, James of Venice, is known in Latin as Iacobus Veneticus Grecus, which could mean that he was a member of the Greek community of Venice. In any event, he was fluent in both Greek and Latin, as indicated by an entry for the year 1128 in the chronicle of Robert of Torigni, abbot at Mont Saint Michel, who wrote that “James, a clerk of Venice, translated from Greek into Latin certain books of Aristotle and commented upon them, namely the Topics, the Prior and Posterior Analytics, and the [Sophistici] Elenchi, although there was an older version of these books.”
James was the first European scholar in the twelfth century to introduce the works of Aristotle to the Latin West. Besides the works mentioned by Robert of Torigni, James was the first to translate from the Greek Aristotle’s Physica, De anima, Metaphysica, and Parva naturalia. His commentary on the Sophistici elenchi shows that he was aware of Byzantine scholarship on this subject in Constantinople, which was an unrivaled source for the works of Aristotle and other Greek writers. James’s translations, together with their revisions, formed the basis for much of Aristotelian studies in Europe up until the sixteenth century.
Burgundio the Pisan traveled frequently from Pisa to Constantinople and to Sicily, another rich source of Greek manuscripts. His translations from the Greek also included the Aphorisms of Hippocrates and ten works of Galen, as well as Aristotle’s Meteorology.
Moses of Bergamo, whom Anselm mentions as the interpreter in the theological disputation of 1136, lived at that time in the Venetian quarter of Constantinople. He wrote in one of his letters that he learned Greek so that he could translate previously unknown manuscripts into Latin. He spent years collecting Greek manuscripts for which he paid a total of three pounds of gold, he says, but they were all destroyed in a fire in 1130.
Translations from Greek to Latin were also done in Sicily during the reign of William I (r. 1154–1166), son and successor of Roger II, who continued his father’s patronage of learning. The two principal translators during his reign were Henricus Aristippus and Eugene the Emir, both of them members of the royal administration who have left eulogies of William commemorating him as a philosopher-king who opened his court to the world’s leading scholars. Aristippus became archbishop of Catania in 1156 and four years later he was placed in charge of the entire administration of the Sicilian kingdom. He was the first to translate from the Greek two of Plato’s dialogues, Meno and Phaedo, as well as the fourth book of Aristotle’s Meteorology, works that remained in use until the early Renaissance. Aristippus also served as envoy to the court of Manuel II Comnenus in Constantinople, where the emperor presented him with a beautiful codex of Ptolemy’s Almagest as a present to King William. The first Latin translation of this manuscript from Greek to Latin was made in Palermo by an anonymous visiting scholar in around 1160. Other works translated from Greek to Latin at the Sicilian court by this scholar include Euclid’s Optica and Catoptrica, the De motu of Proclus, and the Pneumatica of Hero of Alexandria.
The unknown scholar who translated these works notes that in doing so he received considerable assistance from Eugene the Emir, “a man most learned in Greek and Arabic and not ignorant of Latin.” Eugene, who held the Arabic title of emir in the royal administration, was probably a Greek, as evidenced by his surviving poetry.
The Dominican monk William of Moerbeke (b. c. 1220–1235—d. before 1286), in Belgium, was the most prolific of all medieval translators from Greek into Latin. Moerbeke is known to have visited Nicaea in the spring of 1260, when the Byzantines had their capital there until they recaptured Constantinople from the Latins the following year, and he may very well have acquired Greek manuscripts at that time. He took part in the Second Council of Lyons (May–June 1274), whose goal was to bring about a reunion between the Greek and Latin churches, and at a pontifical mass he sang the Credo in Greek together with Byzantine clerics.
Thomas Aquinas is said to have suggested to Moerbeke that he complete the translation of Aristotle’s works directly from the Greek. Moerbeke says that he took on this task “in spite of the hard work and tediousness which it involves, in order to provide Latin scholars with new material for study.”
Moerbeke’s Greek translations included the writings of Aristotle, commentaries on Aristotle, and works of Archimedes, Proclus, Hero of Alexandria, Ptolemy, and Galen. The popularity of Moerbeke’s work is evidenced by the number of extant copies of his translations, including manuscripts from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries; printed editions from the fifteenth century onward; and versions in English, French, Spanish, and even modern Greek done from the fourteenth century through the twentieth. His translations led to a better knowledge of the actual Greek texts of several works, and in a few cases they are the only evidence of lost Greek texts, such as that of Hero’s Catoptrica.
Moerbeke’s only original work is a treatise on divination entitled Geomantia, which was evidently quite popular, as evidenced by the several extant Latin manuscripts and a French translation done in 1347. The Polish scholar Witelo, in the dedication to Moerbeke in his Perspectiva, praises him for his “occult” inquiry into the influence of divine power on humans.
Another Western scholar who visited Constantinople in search of ancient Greek manuscripts was Peter of Abano (1250–c. 1313), who while there found works of Aristotle, Dioscorides, and Galen, among others. His translations from the Greek include a volume of Aristotle’s Problems, the first Latin translation of this work; De materia medica of Dioscorides; and six treatises of Galen.
The most famous of Peter’s original works is his Conciliator differentia cum philosophum et praecipue medicorum, which he completed in 1303, while he was teaching at the University of Paris. This is an enormous tome in which Peter tries to reconcile the conflicting views of the medical writers and philosophers who had preceded him. The Conciliator comprises more than two hundred questions, or “differences,” which Peter says he and his colleagues had been debating for the past decade. The first and eighteenth questions, for example, concern the differences of opinion about whether the heart is the center of the human nervous system, as Aristotle holds, or whether it is the brain, as Peter says. His conclusion concerning the first question is that “the regulative power of the body resides in the brain,” and to the eighteenth that “the brain is the seat of sensation and emotion.” Question 67 asks, “Is life possible below the equator?” It seems that this question occurred to Peter when he met Marco Polo in Constantinople in 1295, after the Venetian’s celebrated journey to the Far East.
Another well-known work by Peter is his Lucidator dubitabilium astronomiae, in which he discusses disputed doctrines in astronomy and astrology. Here he suggests that the stars are not fixed in the outermost celestial sphere, as Aristotle has it in his model of the cosmos, but that they are moving freely in space, an entirely new idea that would become part of modern cosmology. A number of passages in this work indicate that Peter associated spirits and intelligences with the celestial bodies, one of which he describes as “perpetual and incorruptible, leading through all eternity a life most sufficient unto itself, nor ever growing old.”
Peter’s writings on astrology and other occult sciences gave him the reputation of being a magician. French librarian and scholar Gabriel Naude, writing in 1625, calls Peter “a man who appeared as a prodigy and miracle in his age … he was the greatest magician of his age and learned the seven liberal arts from seven familiar spirits whom he held captive in a crystal.” He goes on to say that Peter had in later life abandoned “the idle curiosity of his youth to devote himself wholly to philosophy, medicine and astrology.”
By the end of the twelfth century European science was on the rise, stimulated by the enormous influx of Graeco-Islamic works translated into Latin from Arabic as well as other works translated directly from Greek. This is evidenced by the opening of the medical school at Salerno and the study of ibn Sina; the work in mathematical and observational astronomy by Roger of Hereford; the beginning of studies of both physical and descriptive geography stimulated by the work of al-Idrisi; the acquisition of the Hindu-Arabic numerals by Leonardo Fibonacci and his researches in number theory; and the critical attitude toward Aristotle shown by Frederick II in his treatise on falconry.
By the first quarter of the thirteenth century virtually all of the scientific works of Aristotle had been translated into Latin, from Greek as well as Arabic, along with the Aristotelian commentaries of Averroës (ibn Rushd). The translations included other works by both Greek and Islamic scientists on optics, catoptrics (reflection), geometry, astronomy, astrology, zoology, botany, medicine, pharmacology, psychology, and mechanics. This body of knowledge became part of the curriculum at the first universities that began to emerge in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, supplanting the monastic and cathedral schools of the earlier medieval era.
All of this led to a cultural revival that has been called the Twelfth-Century Renaissance. Charles Homer Haskins, who pioneered the study of this revival, wrote:
Unlike the Carolingian Renaissance, the revival of the twelfth century was not the product of a court or a dynasty; and, unlike the Italian Renaissance, it owed its existence to no single country.… The Renaissance of the twelfth century, like its Italian successor three hundred years later, drew its life from two principal sources. Each was based in part upon the knowledge and ideas already present in the Latin West, in part upon an influx of new learning from the East. But whereas the Renaissance of the fifteenth century was concerned primarily with literature, that of the twelfth century was concerned even more with philosophy and science.
The study of natural philosophy in the twelfth-century schools was based principally on Plato’s Timaeus, the only work of Plato available in western Europe up until the mid-twelfth century, and then only the first fifty-three chapters as translated and commented upon by Chalcidius in the fourth century. As translator and scholar Benjamin Jowett wrote of this curious work: “Of all the writings of Plato, the Timaeus is the most obscure and repulsive to the modern reader, and has nevertheless had the greatest influence over the ancient and medieval world.”
Plato’s ideas in science are contained principally in the Timaeus, where he presents a detailed cosmology and cosmogony that Timaeus, his protagonist, says is “along the lines of the likely stories we have been following.” Timaeus introduces a divine creator called the demiourgos, or craftsman, who uses the ideal Forms as patterns to shape featureless preexisting matter and steer its chaotic motion so as to give order to the cosmos. But, as historian William Guthrie remarked, the demiourgos “is not in sole and absolute control, but must bend to his will a material that is to some extent recalcitrant. Otherwise, being wholly good himself, he would have made a perfect world.”
According to the Timaeus, everything in the universe is composed of the four elements—earth, water, air, and fire—all of which are made up of particles so small that they are invisible. The particles of each element have a definite geometrical shape and are mutually transformable, their main masses arranged in concentric spheres with earth in the center followed by water, air, and fire. The fiery sphere extended from the moon to the fixed stars, containing within it the spheres of the sun, moon, and planets, all of which were made of fire.
Plato relates his cosmogony to the presence of mankind, in a luminous passage where Timaeus points out how our sense of number and time comes from our observation of the heavens: “Our ability to see the periods of day and night, of months and of years, of equinoxes and solstices, has led to the invention of number, and has given us the idea of time and opened the path to inquiry into the nature of the universe. These pursuits have given us philosophy, a gift from the gods to the mortal race whose value neither has been or ever will be surpassed.”
Medieval scholars were faced with the task of reconciling Plato’s cosmology, as expressed in the Timaeus, with the account of creation in Genesis, as explained by the early Church Fathers. This proved to be treacherous territory, as the Church was the only benefactor of science at the time, and acceding to pagans might be viewed harshly by the Church’s contemporary leaders. Thierry of Chartres, who flourished in the first half of the twelfth century, toed this line with admirable aplomb.
Thierry was born in Brittany and is believed to have been teaching as early as 1121 at the cathedral school of Chartres, together with his brother Bernard, who was chancellor there in the years 1119–1126. Thierry is recorded as being archdeacon of Dreux, near Chartres, in 1127, and before 1134 he is known to have taught in Paris. He later returned for a time to Chartres, where he is recorded as being “chancellor and archdeacon of Notre-Dame [of Chartres],” to which he bequeathed his Eptatheuchon, or Book of the Seven Liberal Arts, a summary of the learning of his age in two huge volumes, in which he sought to bring together the trivium and quadrivium “for the multiplication of the noble tribe of scholars.” He seems to have retired around 1155 to a Cistercian monastery, where he died and was buried.
According to scholar Nikolaus Haring, Thierry “is considered to have introduced the concept of rota or zero into European mathematics.” This was tremendously important, for the addition of zero to the Hindu-Arabic numerals in the form that they had taken in the West led the rapid rise of European mathematics, particularly in number theory, where Latin mathematicians soon began to surpass their Arabic and Greek predecessors.
Thierry’s best-known work is the Hexaemeron, a short commentary on the introductory chapters of Genesis, in which he tries to give a rational explanation of the six days of creation, based on Plato’s Timaeus and ideas from the Stoics, Augustine, and Aristotle. According to Thierry, time began with God’s creation of the four elements—earth, water, air, and fire—which through their inherent properties and natural law evolved into the material universe, all of this taking place in successive steps during the first six rotations of the heavens. Thierry’s cosmology and cosmogony (the creation of the cosmos) are based on his theological interpretation of Aristotle’s four causes, which he identifies with the three persons of the Trinity plus matter. God the Father is the efficient cause, the Son is the formal cause, the Holy Spirit is the final cause, and the four elements are the material cause. According to Thierry, the Creator implanted “seminal causes” in the elements to regulate the passage of time, the succession of seasons, and the process of procreation, with a divine power that he calls the world soul governing all matter to give it form and order. He says that this act of orderly creation was due through the Creator’s wisdom and solely because of divine benevolence and love.
Several of Thierry’s colleagues at Chartres were deeply influenced by his Platonism, most notably William of Conches (c. 1090–after 1154) and Bernard Silvestre (c. 1085–1178), both of whom contributed interesting ideas to the development of medieval European science.
William of Conches was hired around 1145 by Geoffrey Plantagenet to tutor the future king Henry II of England. Before then he had probably begun work on his De philosophia mundi, based on Plato’s Timaeus and other sources. Here William adopted a form of atomism based on a combination of Plato’s ideas with those of Lucretius. He stated that God’s universe acts according to natural law, saying that the philosopher’s task is to understand and explain these laws. He criticized the ignoramuses who fall back on divine intervention and condemned as heretical those who try to give a rational explanation of nature.
Bernard Silvestre is best known for his Cosmographica, a poetical cosmogony alternately in prose and verse dramatically describing the six days of creation dedicated to Thierry of Chartres, which he presented to Pope Eugene III in 1147, the only certain date in his life.
Bernard and the other scholars of his time believed in the progress of knowledge, which he and his colleagues at Chartres and elsewhere had achieved through their free and rational use of the learning of their predecessors. As he wrote, in a statement that would be famously echoed by Newton more than five centuries later: “We are like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more things than them, and can see further, not because our vision is sharper and our stature higher, but because we can raise our selves up because of their giant stature.”
Another clear indication of the intellectual revival in the early twelfth century is the large number of manuscripts of that period or shortly before concerned with arithmetical and astronomical reckoning. The arithmetical manuscripts are mostly treatises on the abacus, carrying on in the tradition of Gerbert d’Aurillac. Most of the astronomical writings are copies and excerpts from Bede or, occasionally, Isidore of Seville, sometimes in new compilations.
By the second half of the twelfth century the cathedral schools at Chartres and elsewhere had given way to the new universities that were starting to emerge in Europe, brought into being by the great revival of learning and expansion of knowledge, along with the dramatic increase in number of those seeking a higher education. As Haskins wrote in his pioneering work, The Rise of Universities, in 1923:
This new knowledge burst the bounds of the cathedral and monastery schools and created the learned professions; it drew over mountains and across the narrow sea eager youths who, like Chaucer’s Oxford Clerk of a later day, “would gladly learn and gladly teach,” to form in Paris and Bologna those academic guilds which have given us our first and our best definition of a university, a society of masters and scholars.
The society of master and students referred to by Haskins was known as universitas societas magistorum discipulorumque, from which the word “university” stems. This society was organized along the same lines of any of the medieval craft guilds, such as that of the carpenters, which were dominated by the master craftsmen and operated under charters that regulated all of their activities for the mutual benefit of the members. The universities were self-governing corporations that gradually secured varying degrees of freedom from local jurisdiction and taxation, often with the patronage of emperors, kings, popes, and archbishops, which allowed them to establish their own standards and procedures.
The earliest of the universities, the medical school at Salerno, had a different early development than all of the other new institutions of higher learning. Greek medicine had never wholly vanished from the south of Italy, where Latin versions of Galen and other ancient medical writers can be traced as early as the tenth century, when Salerno first established itself as a center of the healing art. The medical school at Salerno was well established by the second half of the eleventh century, as evidenced by the introduction of the Arabic translations of Constantine the African into the curriculum under the title of Ars medicine or Articella. By the twelfth century Salerno had develop its own medical literature. This was primarily in Latin, but not completely so, for Stephen of Pisa wrote in 1127 that “in Sicily and Salerno, where students of such matters are to be found, there are both Greeks and men familiar with Arabic.”
Among the other institutions of higher learning, the earliest was the University of Bologna, founded in 1088, followed in turn by those of Paris (c. 1150), Oxford (1167), Salerno (1173, a refounding of the medical school), Palenzia (c. 1178), Reggio (1188), Vicenza (1204), Cambridge (1209), Salamanca (1218), and Padua (1222), to name only the first ten, with another ten founded in the remaining years of the thirteenth century. Twenty-five more were founded in the fourteenth century, and another thirty-five in the fifteenth, so that by 1500 there were eighty universities in Europe, evidence of the tremendous intellectual revival that had taken place in the West, beginning with the initial acquisition of Graeco-Arabic learning in the twelfth century.
In Paris, for example, the largest and most prestigious university in northern Europe, which at its peak had more than twenty-five hundred students, there were four faculties, including one undergraduate faculty in the liberal arts, by far the largest of the four, and graduate faculties in law, medicine, and theology. A student usually entered at age fourteen, having previously learned Latin at a grammar school, enrolling under a master whose lectures he attended for three or four years before taking an examination for the degree of bachelor of arts. This degree permitted him to give certain types of lectures under the direction of a master while continuing his studies. When he had followed lectures in all of the required subjects, he could take the examination for the master of arts degree, and if he passed he was given full membership in the arts faculty, with the right to teach any course in the arts curriculum. A student could then enroll in one of the graduate faculties, often while still teaching in the undergraduate faculty. The graduate programs were long and demanding, taking anywhere from five to fifteen years of additional study before one could take an examination for a doctor’s degree in law, medicine, or theology.
The curriculum evolved, so far as the trivium was concerned, with a much greater emphasis on logic at the expense of grammar, while in the quadrivium astronomy dominated, particularly as regards timekeeping and calendrical problems as well as its application to astrology. The liberal arts curriculum was expanded to include lectures in moral philosophy, mental philosophy, and metaphysics, with law, medicine, and theology taught as advanced subjects in the graduate program. The courses were based on textbooks rather than subjects. The teaching texts were Greek and Arabic works in Latin translations, along with new works written especially for the courses. By the second half of the thirteenth century Aristotle’s influence had increased to the point that his works on metaphysics, cosmology, physics, meteorology, psychology, and natural history were required reading, along with commentaries, so that all graduates were thoroughly grounded in Aristotelian natural philosophy.
Bologna became the archetype for later universities in southern Europe, Paris, and Oxford for those in the northern part of the continent. Bologna was renowned for the study of law and medicine, Paris for logic and theology, and Oxford for philosophy and natural science. Training in medicine was based primarily on the teachings of Hippocrates and Galen, astronomy and astrology were based heavily on the writings of Ptolemy, and studies in logic, philosophy, and science were based heavily on the works of Aristotle and commentaries upon them, at first translated from Arabic and then later from Greek.
Meanwhile European scholars were absorbing the Graeco-Arabic learning that they had acquired and adapting it to develop a new philosophy of nature, which, although primarily based upon Aristotelianism, differed from some of Aristotle’s doctrines right from the beginning.
This is evident in the works of Peter of Abano, who, as we learned, tried to reconcile the different theories, often conflicting, of his predecessors, most notably Aristotle, his most revolutionary suggestion being that the stars were not fixed but moving freely in space. This idea, which would be revived in the seventeenth century, would be the first step in breaking the bounds of the static, finite, and earth-centered Aristotelian cosmos, and paving the way for the dynamic and expanding universe of modern astrophysics that has opened up in my own lifetime.
It is interesting that Peter said that he and his colleagues at the University of Paris had been debating these ideas “for the past decade,” clear evidence that the gathering of large numbers of scholars with diverse backgrounds at the new universities was producing an exchange of ideas reminiscent of Plato’s Academy, Aristotle’s Lyceum, and the Museum and Library of Alexandria.
It is also significant that Peter had in his search for ancient manuscripts gone to Constantinople after the renewal of contacts between Latin West and Greek West, and that there he had met Marco Polo, who told him about the journey that had taken him all the way to China and back. At about the same time Fibonacci was in Constantinople, where, as we have learned, he met with Latin, Greek, and Arabic mathematicians, one of the contacts that led to his transmission of the Hindu-Arabic number system to western Europe.
The horizons of Latin Europe were expanding, both intellectually and geographically, setting the stage for the emergence of modern Europe and of modern science, which would eventually spread through the entire world.