Tacuinum Sanitatis

This practical handbook of preventive medicine was put together by the Arab physician Ibn Butlan. A native of Baghdad, where he studied and taught medicine and philosophy, Ibn Butlan traveled widely in the Middle East. In Aleppo the Christian physician and theologian practiced medicine. Among the other places he visited were Jaffa, Cairo, Constantinople, and Antioch, where he entered a monastery and died around 1066 C.E. His best-known work was the Taqwim al-sihha (Tables of Health), a *regimen sanitatis in chart form for quick reference, of which nine Arabic manuscripts have survived. It was translated into Latin in the second half of the thirteenth century by an anonymous translator, probably at the court of Manfred of Sicily in Palermo. Under the title Tacuinum sanitatis it quickly gained popularity across Europe. Some seventeen manuscripts of the Latin version have come down to us, of which the earliest dates back to the thirteenth century. In 1531 the Latin Tacuinum was first printed in Strasbourg, and in 1533 a German translation by the Strasbourg physician Michael Herr followed under the title Schachtafelen der Gesundheyt, that alluded to the arrangement of the charts in the form of a chessboard. Both the Latin and German printed versions contain woodcuts by Hans Weiditz the Younger.

In the Tacuinum sanitatis, the content is divided into forty tacuini or tables of seven objects each that are arranged vertically. Horizontally, fifteen domus or criteria, such as the nature, benefit, or harm of a given item, are listed for each of the two hundred eighty objects. General dietetic information on food and drink from a sixteenth domus precedes the forty tables. In the introduction, Ibn Butlan names the sex res non naturales or six non-natural causes of sickness and health, traditionally part of Regimen sanitatis literature, in the following order: (1) Air; (2) Food and drink; (3) Exercise and rest; (4) Sleeping and waking; (5) Repletion and excretion; and (6) Emotional well-being. Ibn Butlan touches on all of them (albeit in a different order), but does not afford them equal prominence in the book. The first thirty tacuini, three-quarters of the work, are devoted to foodstuffs, and between one and four tacuini each to the remaining five non-naturals. The foodstuffs include fruits, grains, legumes, various types of bread, vegetables, herbs, milk, dairy products, eggs, the meat of domestic and wild animals, birds, fish, and other seafood, animal parts, and some prepared foods. Different types of water, wine, flowers, and desserts conclude the food section. Somewhat surprisingly, the Tacuinum continues with the emotions that normally form the end of a medieval regimen. Discussed are joy, shame, anger, fear, anxiety, and sadness, but also music and dance. The section on the filling and emptying of the body is combined with sleeping and waking, and includes items such as drunkenness, constipation, vomiting, purgation, sex, dreams, and storytelling. As part of exercise are listed riding, hunting, fishing, wrestling, jumping, walking, and ball games, but also clapping hands, playing the lute, and crushing grapes with one’s feet, singing, whistling, bathing and grooming, chess, and rolling dice. Clothing, fragrant substances, syrups, and fruit juices lead into the last section on air, in which the focus is on air quality, temperature, humidity, seasons, winds, geographic location, proximity to mountains and oceans, and soil conditions.

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries a number of much abbreviated and richly illuminated versions of the Tacuinum were produced that became desired showpieces of princely libraries. No longer in tabular form, these luxurious manuscripts typically discussed just over two hundred items each, one per page, with pride of place being given to the images, genre-scenes of daily life in late fourteenth-century Italy; the text was severely reduced. Rooted in the tradition of the illustrated herbal, this type of Tacuinum has survived in at least nine manuscripts, including one in Italian translation. Five manuscripts (Liège, Paris, Vienna, Casanatense, and Rouen) are believed to be closely related and to have originated in the workshops of the artist Giovannino dei Grassi in the valley of the Po River in Lombardy. A concordance of the five slightly different texts reveals that together they list a total of two hundred eighty-six different items. This is more than the two hundred eighty of the complete tabular version. The name of the author, Ibn Butlan, appears in a variety of spellings in the manuscripts (Albullasem, Albulkasem, Ellbochasim, or Ububchasym). Although *Hippocrates, *Galen, *Dioscorides, Oribasius, Rhazes (*al-Razi), Johannitius (*Hunayn ibn Ishaq), and other physicians are mentioned in some manuscripts, Ibn Butlan shows stronger affinities to his contemporaries Haly Abbas (*‘Ali ibn al’ Abbas al Majusi) and Avicenna (*Ibn Sina).

See also Medicine, practical; Medicine, theoretical

Bibliography

Adamson, Melitta Weiss. “Ibn Butlan. Tacuinum sanitatis.” In idem. Medieval Dietetics: Food and Drink in Regimen Sanitatis Literature from 800 to 1400. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1995, 83–91.

Arano, Luisa Cogliati. The Medieval Health Handbook TACUINUM SANITATIS. Translated and adapted by Oscar Ratti and Adele Westbrook. New York: George Braziller, 1976.

Conrad, Lawrence I. “Scholarship and Social Context: A Medical Case from the Eleventh-century Near East.” In Knowledge and the Scholarly Medical Traditions. Edited by Don Bates. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 84–100.

Elkhadem, Hosam. Le “Taqwim al-sihha” (Tacuini sanitatis) d’Ibn Butlan: un traité médical du XIe siècle. Histoire du texte, édition critique, traduction, commentaire. Académie royale de Belgique, classe des lettres, Fonds René Draguet, vol. 7. Leuven, Belgium: Aedibus Peeters, 1990.

Herbarium: Natural Remedies from a Medieval Manuscript. Texts by Adalberto Pazzini and Emma Pirani. Original Captions by Ubuchasym de Baldach. Translated by Michael Langley. New York: Rizzoli, 1980.

Ibn Butlan. The Physicians’ Dinner Party. Edited from Arabic manuscripts and with an introduction by Felix Klein-Franke. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1985.

Opsomer, Carmélia. L’art de vivre en santé. Images et recettes du moyen âge. Le Tacuinum Sanitatis (manuscrit 1041) de la Bibliothèque de l’Université de Liège. Liège: Édition du Perron, 1991.

Pacht, Otto. Early Italian Nature Studies and the Early Calendar Landscape. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (1950) 13: 13–47.

———. Eine wiedergefundene Tacuinum-Sanitatis Handschrift. Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst, 3. F. (1952/53) 3/4: 171–180.

Schacht, J. Ibn Butlan. In Encyclopedia of Islam. Vol. III. 2nd edition. Edited by B. Lewis, V. L. Ménage, Ch. Pellat and †J. Schacht. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1971.

Sigler, Lora Ann. The Genre of Gender: Images of Working Women in the Tacuina sanitatis. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1992.

Spencer, Judith, trans. The Four Seasons of the House of Cerruti. New York: Facts on File, 1984.

Tomas de Cantimpré, Santo, De natura rerum (lib. IV–XII). Tacuinum sanitatis Ibn Butlan. Códice C-67 de la Biblioteca Universitaria de Granada. Facsimile edition, Commentaries, Preliminary Studies, Transcription, Castilian and English Translation under the Direction of Luis García Ballester. Granada: Universidad, 1975.

Ullmann, Manfred. Islamic Medicine. Translated by Jean Watt. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1978.

Wickersheimer, E. Les Tacuini Sanitatis et leur traduction allemande par Michael Herr. In Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance. Vol. XII. Geneva: 1950, 85–97.

Zotter, Hans. Das Buch vom gesunden Leben: die Gesundheitstabellen des Ibn Butlan in der illustrierten ‹bertragung des Michael Herr, nach der bei Hans Schott erschienenen Ausgabe Straflburg 1533; mit 32 getreuen Farbwiedergaben aus dem Tacuinum sanitatis Codex Vindobonensis 2396. Graz, Austria: Akademische Druckund Verlagsanstalt, 1988.

MELITTA WEISS-ADAMSON

Technological Diffusion

The diffusion of technology from East to West was a movement that united the medieval world from China to England into a vast area of shared know-how. Within the broad geographical compass of the Eurasian continental mass, we can of course detect more specific patterns of technical innovation that can be described in more geographically circumscribed terms. Diffusion was one of the main motors of technological innovation and is associated with a variety of other factors, such as the migration of artisans, the patterns of long-distance trade, the development of urban markets, and the need for agricultural production to adjust to rising population, among others. In this movement, the Islamic conquests of the eighth–tenth centuries were crucial because they created a vast zone of cultural interaction stretching from Spain to northern India which was a propitious medium for the spread of ideas. As Needham (I, 220–223) observed, the Islamic world was focal with respect to science; choices were made there that resulted in the acceptance and propagation of Indian and Greek science, for example, but not Chinese. On the other, that filter was not applied with respect to technology.

Westward Movement

There is some convergence of ideas among historians on what Arnold Toynbee (Study of History, 3) called the “cultural conductivity of nomadism” that one finds also in Needham, White, and Allsen. For White, techniques associated with the agricultural revolution of the early Middle Ages diffused westward across the steppes of central Asia through the chain of nomadic societies. So the heavy plow reached the Goths from the Slavs, perhaps by the early sixth century (53), while the stirrup spread “across the great plains of Asia to the region north of Black Sea” (20). Hence it reached Byzantium via the Avars, Bulgars or Magyars. For Toynbee, the reason nomadic groups display cultural conductivity is their very mobility; for Allsen, because nomads are cultural generalists with few developed technical specialties, when they come into control of states (as in the case of the Mongols) they require the acquisition of exogenous ideas and techniques. The Mongols institutionalized cultural borrowing, as in the Office of Western (i.e., Arabic) Astronomy (1263 C.E.). The focality of the Islamic empire in East-to-West technological diffusion also depended on the control of states; yet the Arabs, of course, manifested the characteristic nomadic openness to new techniques when they ended up in control of a vast empire.

Illumination from a thirteenth-century manuscript of the Book of Games by Alfonso X, King of Spain. (Corbis/Gianni Dagli Orti)

Harnessing

Andre Haudricort (1948) argued on linguistic evidence that the modern horse-collar originated in central Asia and reached eastern and northern Europe from the East around 800 C.E. Part of the argument concerning the rigid horse-collar has to be with the relationship between it and elements of the camel saddle and packs. Although the details are confusing and the origins and diffusion of specific components unclear, the social context of the evolution of the collar is the relationship between camel-riding nomads and sedentary farmers. Harnessing technology is an interesting vehicle for the study of technological diffusion and comparative history of technology because it has a limited number of components (breast or withers strap, whipple-tree, shafts joined by a crossbar, and collar) found in various configurations. Bulliet’s solution (204–205) is that the collar reached Europe through the chain of central Asian nomads, while the breast strap arrived from North Africa. He further identifies, also on the basis of linguistic evidence, two families of harnesses in southern Europe: a Mediterranean sphere encompassing North Africa, Spain, Italy, and the western Mediterranean islands, with Sicily and Spain providing the channels of transmission between North Africa and Europe, and a French-Provencal sphere.

Chess

The game of chess originated in India and was then cultivated in Persia: these regions were the immediate sources of the Arabic game, which became known as al-Sitranj. Thus chess followed the same path of diffusion westward as did Indian astronomy and mathematics, and possibly was played by merchants along the Silk Route. The first technical treatises in Arabic appeared in the ninth century.

Paper and Sugar Manufacture

In the manufacture of *paper and sugar, related techniques tended to diffuse in discrete packages. The vertical watermill traveled from east to west as the organizing element in a distinctive package of Chinese techniques that included the processing of oil, paper, sugar, indigo, lac, and tea, all by means of vertical, trip-hammer mills, wherein hammers attached to the axis of the water-wheel pounded the product to the point where the process could be continued manually (Daniels). It is possible to trace the diffusion of paper and sugar manufacture across the Arabic-speaking world by noting the appearance of the surnames al-Warraq (paper-maker) or al-Sukkari (sugar-maker) in the ninth century. It is likely, therefore, that paper and sugar processing arrived at the western terminus of diffusion, Islamic Spain, simultaneously, along with the vertical wheel and trip-hammer assembly, which could also be used for the fulling (pounding) of woolen cloth and for rice husking. The prototype of the common tilt-hammer fulling mill was the Chinese rice-husking mill, which was vertical and undershot.

Indian Agriculture

The same holds true for a distinctive package of crops and agricultural techniques that the Arabs called filaha hindiyya—Indian *agriculture. A cluster of crops grown in India under monsoon conditions (sugar cane, rice, citrus trees, watermelon) could only be grown under irrigation the Mediterranean region, with its summer droughts. So they diffused along with Persian and Arab irrigation techniques (such as the qanat or filtration gallery and the *noria), which formed part of a flexible “tool kit” that tribal irrigators could deploy in a variety of microclimates with different topographical and hydro-logical conditions.

West-to-East Diffusion

Techniques diffused in the opposite direction too, of course. A simplified astrolabe or saphea invented by *al-Zarqalluh in eleventh-century *Toledo became known in the Near East. Ibn al-Qifti (d. 1248) says: “Al-Zarqalluh invented the saphea on which, in spite of its small size, are conjoined the most ephemeral details of the science of the movements of the celestial spheres. When the scholars of the East learned of this apparatus there were incapable of understanding it until God helped them” (Vernet, 564).

See also Astrolabes and quadrants; Irrigation and drainage; Watermills

Bibliography

Allsen, Thomas T. Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Bulliet, Richard W. The Camel and the Wheel. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975.

Daniels, Christian. Agro-Industries: Sugarcane Technology. In Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 6, part 3. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 1–539.

Needham, Joseph. Science and Civilisation in China. Vol. I. Introductory Orientations. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1954.

Vernet, Juan. La ciencia en el Islam y Occidente. In Occidente e l’Islam nell’alto medioevo, 2 vols. Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 1965, II: 537–572.

White, Lynn, Jr. Medieval Technology and Social Change. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962.

THOMAS F. GLICK

Thabit Ibn Qurra

Thabit ibn Qurrah Abu’l Hasan ibn Zahrun al-Harrani (known as Thebit Ben Corah in the Latin West), was one of the most highly accomplished scholars in the Arabic world, especially in the field of mathematics. He was born in Harran in northern Mesopotamia, probably in 824 C.E., and died in Baghdad on February 19, 901. He owed to his origins in Harran his knowledge of Syriac (his native tongue), and his experience of the star-worshipping sect of the Sabaeans, whom he is said to have represented in Baghdad. Having settled in Baghdad at an early age, under the tutelage of the three brothers and mathematicians called the Banu Musa, he soon became the leading figure of his time in the translation of Greek mathematical works, which he interpreted and supplemented with innumerable works of his own. He was supported by the caliphs, and worked closely with *Hunayn ibn Ishaq, several of whose translations he revised. Nearly two hundred works are attributed to him, mostly in Arabic, but a few in Syriac. Among the numerous Greek works he translated, or of which he improved an earlier translation of, are Epaphroditus’s commentary on Aristotle’s Meteorology, several works of *Archimedes, books V–VII of Apollonius of Perga’s Conica (the Greek original of which is lost), *Euclid’s Elements, Data, and Optics, Nicomachus of Gerasa’s Introduction to Arithmetic, Pappus’s Commentary on *Ptolemy’s Planisphere, Theodosius’s Spherics, Autolycus’ On the Moving Sphere, and Ptolemy’s Almagest, Planetary Hypotheses, and Geography. Of many more works he made synopses or abridgements (especially in respect to Aristotle’s logical works, *Galen’s medical works and Ptolemy’s astrological handbook, the Tetrabiblos) and commentaries (e.g., of the Almagest, and of *Plato’s Republic). His original writings cover the fields of the divisions of science, natural science, music, medicine, and mechanics. Especially important and influential are his works on *arithmetic and geometry, astronomy and on astrological images (talismans). He showed how algebraic and geometrical proofs related to each other, and developed theorems for measuring cones, paraboloids and spheroids which were independent of Greek precedents. The theorem that he discovered for generating “amicable numbers” (i.e., pairs of numbers in which the sum of the factors of one is equal to the other), still goes under his name. In astronomy the two focuses of his attention were the mathematical paradigms whose model was provided in the Almagest, the culmination of Greek mathematical astronomy, and the data in the Zij al-Mumtahan, the astronomical tables commissioned by the caliph al-Ma’mun in about 830, which represented the most rigorous combination of mathematical learning and observation up to that date. Thabit did not follow his Greek predecessors uncritically. He was well known for advocating the non-Ptolemaic astronomical theory of “trepidation”—the forward and backward movement of the sphere of the fixed stars. It may be no coincidence that, in this, he follows a theory that Theon of Alexandria attributes to ancient makers of talismans (hoi palaioi ton apotelesmatikon). For he wrote on manipulating astrological and other natural forces by means of manufactured talismans—even using the “sympathetic” relations of amicable numbers for empowering talismans of love. This interest, which sets him apart from his contemporary mathematicians in Baghdad, may be related to his involvement with the Harranian Sabaeans, on whose beliefs he wrote several texts on Syriac. Several of Thabit’s translations or revisions were in turn translated into Latin, but his name was no longer associated with these texts. Thabit’s European reputation rests rather on: (1) The small collection of original astronomical texts that were translated into Latin, mainly by *Gerard of Cremona in the third quarter of the twelfth century; and (2) His work on talismans, versions of which were translated by *Adelard of Bath and *John of Seville, again in the twelfth century. The Arabic original of the Latin text on trepidation attributed to him—De motu octave sphere—has not been identified, and doubt has been cast on his authorship, but it served to make the theory canonical among several generations of Western astronomers through being adopted in Gerard of Cremona’s Theorica planetarum.

See also Astronomy, Islamic; Translation norms and practice

Bibliography

Carmody, F.J. The Astronomical Works of Thabit b. Qurra. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960.

Roshdi Rashed. Les mathématiques infinitésimales du IXe au XIe siècle, I. London: al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation, 1996, pp. 139–673.

Thabit ibn Qurra. Oeuvres d’astronomie. Ed. Régis Morelon. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1987.

CHARLES BURNETT

Theorica Planetarum

Theorica planetarum is the name given to a group of textbooks on astronomy in use from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries. The term theorica is derived from a medieval division of astronomy into two parts: a pars theorica on computational astronomy, and a pars practica on *astrology. A theorica explains the planetary models of *Ptolemy in sufficient detail to enable the student to understand and use *planetary tables, but without introducing advanced material, such as the derivation of models from observation, for which students would have to refer to Ptolemy’s Almagest itself.

A theorica planetarum covers only the more complicated motions of each planet and of the sphere of fixed stars. It says nothing about the motion of rising and setting shared by all celestial objects, which in geocentric systems is held to be caused by their daily rotation around the Earth. This was known as the “first motion,” to distinguish it from the “second motions” of the planets. Before reading a theorica planetarum, the student studied a more elementary type of astronomical textbook on the daily rotation known as a sphaera or “sphere,” most likely the Tractatus de sphaera written by *John of Sacrobosco in the thirteenth century.

Medieval Theoricae

Several minor theoricae planetarum are known from the Middle Ages. However, two medieval theoricae clearly dominated the genre. The first and more popular of these was probably written by *Gerard of Cremona. His name certainly appears on many early printed editions, but since the majority of manuscripts are anonymous texts, authorship has been contested. In support of the tenuous medieval tradition of authorship, Richard Lemay has drawn attention to a manuscript of the theorica collected with works translated by Gerard. Perhaps it is safest to regard Gerard as the only serious candidate, which would place the composition of the theorica in the second half of the twelfth century. Otherwise it may be a thirteenth-century work. In the nineteenth century Boncompagni proposed Gerard of Sabbionetta as the true author of this theorica. Since no medieval manuscript makes this attribution and no other evidence supports it, Boncompagni’s theory has fallen out of favor, but the reader may find Gerard of Sabbionetta named as the author in some older studies.

The theorica planetarum ascribed to Gerard treats Ptolemaic planetary theory in eight chapters on the Sun, the Moon, the motions of the lunar nodes used to predict eclipses (called Dragon’s Head and Dragon’s Tail), the three superior planets (Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn), the inferior planets (Mercury and Venus), eclipses and epicyclic phenomena (i.e., stations and retrogradations), latitude theory (a chapter which also contains material on the precession of the equinoxes and other subjects), and astrological aspects (significant positioning of the planets with respect to each other). An overview of the chapter on solar theory will serve to illustrate the character of the text as a whole. The Sun moves around the Earth on a circle which is eccentric, meaning that its center is actually at a slight distance from the center of the world. (This is the deferent circle of Ptolemaic astronomy.) Consequently, even though the Sun’s motion is perfectly uniform, it appears to speed up and slow down as it approaches and recedes from us. The main purpose of the chapter—and of the book as a whole—was to provide a glossary for planetary tables, which employed specialized words for the circles, lines, and points used to compute the Sun’s position. Like the Almagest, this theorica presents the motions of the planets in terms of geometrical circles. It says nothing about converting the models into systems of nesting orbs, although a method of conversion was used in medieval *cosmology.

The theorica strays from the Almagest in minor respects. For instance, Ptolemy did not include the lunar nodes as discrete concepts; the importance of the Dragon’s Head and Tail was a development of medieval astronomy. Neither did he discuss aspects in the Almagest, which did not cover astrology. The material on latitude theory in the theorica includes a method of calculation originating in India, a sign of the interconnections between medieval Latin, Islamic, and Hindu astronomy. Minor changes such as these do not detract from the importance of the theorica as a textbook. Despite being terse, sometimes to the point of obscurity, the book satisfied the need to provide students with an introduction to the recently rediscovered astronomy of the ancients.

Olaf Pedersen, author of a series of articles on the theorica, identified over two hundred manuscripts. It was also frequently printed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In either form, it is often bound with Sacrobosco’s Sphaera and sometimes a set of tables or other astronomical texts. Medieval and Renaissance statutes from the universities of Paris and Oxford confirm that arts students satisfied the requirements of the *quadrivium in part by reading a sphaera at the bachelor’s level and a theorica planetarum at the master’s. We can be sure that many read “Gerard’s” theorica.

The other principal theorica was by *Campanus de Novara, who gave instructions on the manufacture of a set of astronomical instruments known as equatoria. An equatorium represents the motion of a planet by a series of rotating disks. It may be used for crude but rapid calculations or for teaching purposes. What makes this theorica more accessible than purely geometrical representations of planetary models is its likening of disks to cross-sections of three-dimensional orbs. In the same book, Campanus calculated the size of each planet and its minimum and maximum distances from Earth in miles, based on parameters from an astronomical textbook by al-Farghani (ninth century). Campanus’s theorica and his system of planetary distances were popular in the fifteenth century, but interest in them declined rapidly after the Middle Ages. It was not printed before modern times.

Theoricae in the Renaissance

In 1454 the humanist and astronomer *Georg Peuerbach began to use a theorica of his own composition for his lectures in astronomy. One of his students, *Johannes Regiomontanus, became both a celebrated mathematician in his own right and one of the first scientific publishers. In 1472 he printed Peuerbach’s lectures. They were reprinted many times through the seventeenth century under some variation of the title Theoricae novae planetarum. He also printed a short work of his own composition, the Disputationes contra deliramenta Cremonensia, attacking the old theorica and implicitly promoting the new.

The Theoricae novae covers essentially the same material as its competitor, although the arrangement of material is slightly altered. For instance, precession and latitude theory each has its own chapter. Peuerbach explains each model in a detailed and comprehensible manner, presenting them as sets of orbs, unlike the popular medieval theorica, which had treated them as combinations of circles.

The fate of the theorica genre is intimately tied to the rediscovery of Ptolemy in the Latin West. Before its appearance, planetary astronomy could be learned only from rudimentary handbooks. Even early theoricae represent a great advance in the teaching of astronomy. The theoricae of Campanus and Peuerbach are progressively more sophisticated and take the reader closer to the technical level of the Almagest. It is no coincidence that Regiomontanus, Nicolas Copernicus, and other leading figures of the Renaissance learned astronomy from Peuerbach’s Theoricae novae. But by the seventeenth century the theorica had outlived its usefulness.

See also Astrolabes and quadrants; Astronomy, Latin

Bibliography

Aiton, E. J. Peurbach’s Theoricae novae planetarum: A Translation with Commentary. Osiris, 2nd series (1987) 3: 5–44.

Benjamin, Jr., Francis S., and G. J. Toomer. Campanus of Novara and Medieval Planetary Theory: “Theorica Planetarum.” Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971.

Pedersen, Olaf. Theorica: A Study in Language and Civilization. Classica et Mediaevalia (1961) 22: 151–166.

———. “The Decline and Fall of the Theorica Planetarum: Renaissance Astronomy and The Art of Printing.” In Science and History: Studies in Honor of Edward Rosen. Wroclaw: Polish Academy of Sciences Press, 1978. Studia Copernicana 16, 157–185.

KATHERINE A. TREDWELL

Thomas of Cantimpré

Thomas of Cantimpré (de Chantimpré, de Brabant, van Bellenghem, or DeMonte) was born in Bellingen, Brabant, Flanders, in 1200/02, and died in Louvain in 1263/72.

According to his own writings and secondary sources based on those writings (absent archival documents), Thomas (possibly his monastic name), was the son of a nobleman, DuMont, who traveled to the Holy Land and served King Richard I of England (Richard Coeur de Lion). Thomas was educated from a very young age for a life in the Roman Church, as insurance for his father’s spiritual welfare. His early years from the age of about five were spent in school, probably in Cambrai. In 1216/17, profoundly influenced by Jacques de Vitry, he became a canon regular in the Augustinian brotherhood at Cantimpré, where he remained for fifteen years. In 1231/32 he joined the Dominican preaching order in Louvain (founded 1228), to which he remained attached for the rest of his life. He spent 1237–1240 in Paris studying, and after 1248 went to Cologne, where he became a disciple (auditor) and probably collaborator of *Albertus Magnus for several years, when *Thomas Aquinas was Albertus’s student.

Thomas of Cantimpré’s output is divided between hagiographical works (four lives of saints and a supplement to another) and two major works ostensibly devoted to the natural world. The unifying impetus for all was a concern with preaching: to offer preachers and educators mnemonically striking material which would remain with an audience and provide exempla for moral behavior. To this end also, early in his career he chose to memorialize intensely lived saints’ lives, although later his interest transferred to lives representing spiritual development. The lives he penned were: Vita Ioannis Abbatis primi Monasterii Cantimpratensis et eius Ecclesiae fundatoris (Prologue 1223/8; last chapter at the end of his life); Supplementum to deVitry’s Vita Mariae Oigniacensis in Namurcensi Belgii Dioecesi (c. 1230); Vita Cristinae Virginis cognomento Mirabilis (1232); Vita B. Margaretae Iprensis (1240); and Vita Piae Lutgardis (c. 1248).

The two works which concern us here are De natura rerum and Bonum universale de apibus. De natura rerum(c. 1225–1240) is the first of the great thirteenth-century *encyclopedias to deal with the natural world. It occurs fragmentarily or complete, anonymously or attributed to others (including Albertus), in upward of one hundred sixty manuscripts, forty-four of which Boese collated for a modern edition of the text (without apparatus). Thomas identifies himself as its author in the preface to Bonum de apibus. The twenty books deal with human anatomy, the soul, monstrous men, quadrupeds, birds, marine monsters, fish, serpents, lowly creatures (vermes), trees, plants, stones, metals, the airy regions, the planets including the Sun, meteorology, the elements, and astronomy. Land and sea monsters are included as especially memorable examples of behavior. The work is a compilation based primarily on available texts (sometimes secondhand) by Aristotle, *Pliny, *Galen, Augustine, Ambrose, Basil, Isidore, Solinus, and Jacques de Vitry. While it is clear that Thomas took interest in the natural world, he makes little attempt to reconcile his book-learning with observable phenomena. Thomas interweaves with the natural lore (some accurate, some not) moralizations of use to preachers in indicating appropriate manners of social behavior, (thereby implicitly accepting humankind’s animal nature). This work, just prior to *Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum (pre-1260), is cited extensively by title in *Vincent of Beauvais’ Speculum naturale, and used by Albertus Magnus (De animalibus); it formed the basis for two great translations, Jacob van Maerlant’s Der Naturen Bloeme (c. 1270) in Flemish verse, and Jacob von Megenberg’s Buch der Natur (c. 1349) in German prose, and was the direct source of the earliest natural history text (1460) of the modern age (rewritten in humanist Latin and shorn of moralizations), Pier Candido Decembrio’s De animantium naturis.

Bonum universale de apibus (1246–1253) is an allegorical work on the life of the bees under their “king” bee (as the queen was considered until the seventeenth-century dissections of Jan Swammerdam proved the hive’s central figure to be female). It consists of two main books, the second much longer than the first, and is extant complete in eighty-six manuscripts (fragmentarily in twenty-nine) and several early printed editions (c. 1472–1627). In it, the beehive is viewed as the perfect society, to be emulated by all monastic societies. The “king” bee is equated with the abbot, and the workers with the monks, obedient and silent. The structure of the work is based on the long chapter on bees in De natura rerum, greatly expanded and developed for moralistic purposes and as a preaching and teaching guide for the orders.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Thomas Cantimpratensis. Liber de Natura Rerum. Editio Princeps secundum Codices Manuscriptos. Teil I: Text. Ed. H. Boese. New York: Walter De Gruyter, 1973.

Thomas Cantipratanus. Bonum universale de apibus. Ed. G. Colveneer. Douai: Baltazar Bellerus, 1627.

Thomas de Cantimpré. Les exemples du “Livre des Abeilles” Une vision médiévale. Intr., ed., tr., H. Platelle. Turnhout: Brepols, 1997.

Tomás de Cantimpré. De natura rerum (lib. IV-XII). Facsimile, 2 vols. Ed. Luís García Ballester. Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1974. (English Translation, Bks. IV–XII, by C. Talbot, Commentary Volume: 251–318.)

Secondary Sources

Aiken, P. The Animal History of Albertus Magnus and Thomas of Cantimpré. Speculum (1947) 22: 205–225.

Boese, H. Zur Textüberlieferung von Thomas Cantimpratensis’ Liber de natura rerum. Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum (1969) 39: 53–68.

Bormans, M. Thomas de Cantimpré indiqué comme une des sources où Albert-le-Grand et surtout Maerlant ont puisé les matériaux de leurs écrits sur l’histoire naturelle. Bulletin de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres, et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique (1852) 19: 132–159.

Deboutte, A. Thomas van Cantimpré. Zijn Opleiding te Kamerijk. Ons Geestelijk Erf (1982) 56: 283–299.

———. Thomas van Cantimpré, als Auditor van Albertus Magnus. Ons Geestelijk Erf (1984) 58: 192–209.

Godding, R. Une oeuvre inédite de Thomas de Cantimpré La “Vita Ioannis Cantipratensis.” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique (1981) 76: 241–316.

———. Vie apostolique et société urbaine à l’aube du XIIIe siècle. Une oeuvre inédite de Thomas de Cantimpré. Nouvelle revue théologique (1982) 104: 692–721.

Newman, B. Possessed by the Spirit: Devout Women, Demoniacs, and the Apostolic Life in the Thirteenth Century. Speculum (1998) 73: 733–770.

Pollini, N. “Animals and Animal Lore in the ‘Bonum universale de apibus’ of Thomas of Cantimpré (c. 1200–1270).” Ph.D. Thesis, University of Oxford, 2003.

Pyle, C. M. Das Tierbuch des Petrus Candidus. Codex Urbinas Latinus 276. Eine Einführung. Tr. T. Honref, J. Schlechta. Zurich: Belser Verlag, 1984. (Codices e Vaticanis Selecti, LX.)

———. The Art and Science of Renaissance Natural History: Thomas of Cantimpré, Pier Candido Decembrio, Conrad Gessner and Teodoro Ghisi in Vatican Library MS Urb. lat. 276. Viator (1996) 27: 265–321.

Quétif, J. & J. Échard. “F. Thomas de Cantimprato.” In Scriptores ordinis praedicatorum. 4 vols. Paris: J.B.C. Ballard and N. Simart, 1719 (rpt. New York: Burt Franklin, 1959). I, i: 250–254.

Roisin, S. “La méthode hagiographique de Thomas de Cantimpré.” In Miscellanea Historica in honorem Alberti de Meyer. Louvain: Bibliothèque de l’Université, Bruxelles: “Le Pennon,” 1946. pp. 546–557.

Van der Vet, W. A. Het Biënboec van Thomas van Cantimpré en zijn Exempelen. ’S-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1902.

CYNTHIA M. PYLE

Toledo

Toledo’s image in the rest of medieval Europe as a capital of science was based on three related phenomena. First, Toledo was an astronomical center, symbolized by the Toledan Tables, *Ibn al-Zarqalluh’s compilation of astronomical tables which made it possible to predict the movements of heavenly bodies with greater accuracy than those preceding them in the Latin world. Second, Toledo was widely viewed as the prime locus of astrological science, represented by the so-called “Letter of Toledo,” a short prediction of gloom and doom associated with celestial conjunctions that appeared in the late-twelfth century and was disseminated throughout Europe over the following centuries, with the same format, though with changes in details to fit each situation. Third, Toledo was reputed a great center of black magic, a reputation very closely tied to popular conceptions of Arabic science.

Toledo came to be a center of science for much the same reason Baghdad had. The Taifa king al-Ma’mun—the same king who granted refuge to the young Alfonso VI of Castile—had gathered around him a group of scientists in emulation of his Abbasid namesake, who had patronized translation and presided over the *Bayt al-Hikma of Baghdad. The effort was organized by the qadi *Sa’id al-Andalusi and included mathematicians and physicians as well as astronomers such as Sa’id himself, al-Istiji, Ibn Khalaf, and the group’s leading light, Ibn al-Zarqalluh, compiler of the Toledan Tables and author of its very influential canons, or instructions for use, who in turn was the intellectual heir of the great astronomer and mathematician *Maslama of Madrid—founder of a great dynasty of astronomers, created in Córdoba, at the beginning of the eleventh century and which included *Ibn al-Saffar and *Ibn al-Samh.

The Toledan Tables were the work of a group of Toledan astronomers during the reign of al-Ma’mun, working under the patronage of Sa’id al-Andalusi, twelve astronomers in number, according to the Yesod ha-‘Olam of Isaac Israeli the younger (1310), among whom the leading figure was Azarquiel, that is, al-Zarqalluh himself. An early Latin translation of the tables in fact attributed them to Sa’id. Sa’id, however, in his account of Andalusi science (Tabaqat al-‘umam, written in 1068), does not mention the Tables, and we know that Azarquiel carried out his first observations in 1061. Most of the tables, however, are not original, but represent a pastiche of those of *al-Khwarizmi, *al-Battani, and al-Zarqalluh himself. In terms of accuracy, the Toledan Tables were seriously flawed, with values for Mercury and Mars, for example, which erred by a figure of greater than ten degrees. The Tables were simply the result of the desire of Sa’id and his group to adjust preexisting table to the latitude of Toledo. Sa‘id probably directed the effort to select and adapt existing tables and, after his death, al-Zarqalluh continued the project. The latter left Toledo for Córdoba in the early 1080s and it is not known who might have worked on the Tables afterwards. The Toledan Tables were not superseded in Spain until the 1270s when *Alfonso X the Wise oversaw the recension of new tables, known as Alfonsine. In England in the second half of the fourteenth century all tables were still associated with Toledo, partly because the meridian of Toledo had become standard. When the clerk in “The Franklin’s Tale” brings out his “Tables Tolletanes,” *Chaucer was most likely thinking of more recent tables (he says they are “full wel corrected”) which retained Toledo as the meridian (North, 148–149).

From the late-eleventh century there ensued a feverish period in which recension after recension of tables were produced (tables need constantly to be brought up to date because the errors were cumulative; they also needed to be adapted to the latitude of the place of observation). The demand for astronomical tables was driven by the political elite’s appetite for “political astrology,” that is the casting of political predictions in the form of horoscopes. Taifa kings, in particular, wanted access to instant predictions: thus, al-Mu’tamid of Seville, before the battle of Sagrajas, asked his court astrologers how it was all going to work out! The typical Christian astrologer of the later Middle Ages was a courtier, casting horoscopes or making political predictions for monarchs and spiritual and temporal magnates. The sheer number of copies of tables (as opposed to recensions) is a mirror of the prestige accruing to someone from merely owning such a powerful scientific guide to human events.

A related phenomenon was the demand for simplified astrolabes which could be used by persons with relatively little training. These were designed to obviate the chief limitation of the standard model which required a special plate for each latitude. Al-Zarqalluh was the first to design this kind of universal instrument which he called the Abbadiyya saphea (safiha), after the royal house of the Taifa kingdom of Seville. Later, he designed an even simpler model called al-Shakkaziyya. Both models lacked the “spider” or rete on which the rotation of the heavens around the Earth was represented on standard astrolabes. Thus Ibn Khalaf designed still another model in 1071, dedicated to Al-Ma’mun of Toledo, which had a simplified “spider.” With the Christian conquest of the city, the fame of both Toledo’s tables and her astrolabes began to diffuse northward.

Toledo Cathedral. The foundation stone was laid in 1227 during the reign of King Ferdinand III. (Corbis/Macduff Everton)

Arabic into Latin in Toledo

Translation activity had begun in Spain in the Ebro Valley in the early-twelfth century. The early translation movement in Toledo has been associated with the French Archbishop Raymond (served 1126–1152) and with three dominant figures: *Gerard of Cremona, *Domingo Gundisalvo, and Abraham ibn Daud. But neither Gerard nor Gundisalvo can be documented in the chapter of the Toledo Cathedral until after Raymond’s death, and Ibn Daud did not arrive in Toledo from al-Andalus until around 1160. Ibn Daud and Gundisalvo worked together on occasion, the former translating from Arabic into Castilian aloud, and the latter writing down a Latin translation. The attraction of Toledo was the ready supply of Arabic manuscripts there awaiting transplantation. Moreover sometime after the fall of Saragossa in 1118, the library of the Beni Hud, which was rich in scientific manuscripts, arrived in Toledo. Ibn Daud translated at least eleven astrological works of important authors like *al-Kindi, *Abu Ma‘shar, and *Thabit ibn Qurra, and philosophical works by Aristotle, al-Kindi, Qusta ibn Luqa, al-Farabi, and Ibn Sina. Gundisalvo was a central figure in the renewal of the *quadrivium in his book De divisione Philosophiae (On the Divisions of Philosophy), a free translation *al-Farabi’s Enumeration of the Sciences (Ihsa al-‘ulum). Gerard, who went to Toledo because he had heard that copies of Ptolemy’s Almagest could be found there, worked in all fields, not only astronomy, astrology, and philosophy but in medicine as well.

In the course of the twelfth century, Toledo became associated with a style of science sensitive to the power of mathematics, particularly insofar as astronomy was concerned. This is why Gerard of Cremona went there specifically to study and translate Ptolemy’s great astronomical treatise, the Almagest: he went there—“Toletum perexit”—for the love of the Almagest, which is minimally studied among the Latins—“amore tamen almagesti; quem apud latinos minime reperti.” Because of that translation specifically, “high-level mathematical astronomy there was introduced into a Europe.” This too is why Daniel of Morley, among others, journeyed to Toledo some time in the 1160s: “When I heard that the doctrine of the Arabs, which is devoted almost entirely to quadrivium, was all the fashion in Toledo in those days, I hurried there as quickly as I could, so that I could hear the wisest philosophers in the world” (Burnett, 61–62). Daniel specifically went to hear Gerard lecture on the Almagest and the “fatal influence of the stars,” and discussed philosophical issues with Gerard’s Mozarab translation partner, Galippus, in the “tongue of Toledo,” surely Castilian.

Natural philosophers steeped in the Toledan tradition of Arabic science produced propaganda endorsing the objectives and achievements of the new science. An example is the letter of *Pedro Alfonso known as the “Letter to the Peripatetics of France,” in which he dismissed those scholars who studied mainly grammar and dialectic. Mathematics was the basis of learning, chiefly because without it, one cannot hope to master astronomy, just to learn which many people “traverse distant provinces and exile themselves in remote regions” (surely he meant Spain). Pedro spent a number of years in England, imparting the new science and preparing astronomical tables. According to Southern (167–168), Arabic science “made it possible for [English] astronomy to advance beyond the stage it had reached in the age of Bede.” Walcher of Malvern’s lunar observations provide “a visible witness to the union of the old Anglo-Saxon scientific curiosity and the new resources [imported from Islamic Spain] of scientific measurement and discovery.”

The Letter of Toledo

The Letter of Toledo was an astrological prediction first issued in 1179 and valid until September in the eighth year following (1187), during which time there was to be a great conjunction of planets in Libra and the Dragon’s tail, which indicated great perturbations in the places influenced by Saturn and Mars: there would be earthquakes, a great wind that would flatten cities like Mecca and Baghdad, and would be preceded by a total eclipse of the Sun and Moon. The Muslims would abandon their mosques and embrace Christianity. The Letter, which circulated in German, French, Italian, and Latin versions, was a landmark, “the first great chance [for astrology] to prove its value as a practical historical tool,” according to Southern. That is, the new cosmology emanating from Toledo with its “precise doctrine of celestial causality” set in motion “the recovery of historical time proper to the astrology of late antiquity and of the Arab world: the great events which mark the history of humanity, migrations of peoples and succession of kingdoms, the birth of prophets and religions, are registered in the heavens: it was principally the great conjunctions of the upper planets—Saturn and Jupiter—which… act upon those historical events with universal significance, just as the lower planets preside over events of less importance and shorter duration.”

A conjunction is the simultaneous appearance in the same house of the zodiac of two heavenly bodies. Great conjunctions involved three and were thought to produce religious upheaval, especially mass conversions. Hence they were the occasion for apocalyptic effusions in an epoch rent with religious confrontation and competition. In this sense did astrology, in Gregory’s characterization, become “a hermeneutics of the Christian apocalypse.”

In all likelihood, the Toledo letter had a Near Eastern prototype in a famous prediction based on the same conjunction made by the Persian poet and astrologer, Anwari, who, having earlier declared himself skilled “in every science, pure or applied, known to any of his contemporaries,” was humiliated when the cataclysm he predicted failed to occur on the appointed day, which was August 13, 1186. Besides Anwari, Ibn al-Athir mentioned it, as did an anonymous fragment preserved in the Cairo Geniza.

The Letter of Toledo is not known in Spain as such and did not—apparently—circulate there until after 1200. Although one of the earliest manuscripts of the Letter was copied in the monastery of Ripoll around 1200, there may still be reason to doubt its connection with Toledo. In the early (and some later) recensions of the Letter, the word for “mosque” is rendered as Machomeria, mahumeria, maumeria, synagoga maumertica, etc. It is obvious that mahumeria, in the sense of “mosque,” is a Gallicism, mahumerie or mahomerie, a term found in Latin as written by Frenchmen or Provençals and some Germans and Englishmen but not by Spaniards or Catalans. The mere presence of this word is not in itself enough to discredit Toledo as the place of origin of the Letter, but, at the very least, suggests the early intervention of a French-speaking Christian, either in the transmission of the Letter or the redaction of the original. The Spanish term mezquita, from Arabic masjid, mosque, was not known in Spain, either in Latin or Romance forms, before the First Crusade.

The authorship of the Letter of Toledo is ascribed in early recensions of it to Johannes David of Toledo. With the passage of time, authorship was ascribed to different persons, although the text remained substantially the same: thus MS Prague 1544, dated 1229, attributes the letter to a “magnus astrologus” from Toledo and MS Admont 318, from around 1200, to Gozwinus. Gozwinus is surely Qazwini, known for his writing on divination if not for astrology per se. In Roger of Hoveden’s Chronicle, the expert is a mysterious “Corumphiza,” perhaps a deformation of al-Khwarizmi.

The original 1186 prediction was adapted almost literally to the conjunction of 1229. Then in the mid-fourteenth century, around the time of the Plague and after, a spate of conjunction predictions involved various Toledo-based, including the association of the astrologers with the Toledan Tables and the simplified astrolabe, although the specific format of the Letter of Toledo was not generally used. The tables of planetary velocity of *Profatius (Profeit ibn Tibbon) and the Toledan Tables were the chief sources for the prediction of the conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars that was to occur in March 1345. A notable participant in predictions around this conjunction was John of Lignères whose important tables of 1322 were highly dependent on the Toledan Tables in spite of John’s acquaintance with the Alfonsine corpus. Lignères was also the designer of a saphea based on that of al-Zarqalluh. John of Eschenden, more in the tradition of the Letter, made a similar prediction of the conjunction of 1357, attributing its source to one “Milo of Toledo.” This conjunction and that of 1368 were considered propitious for undertaking a crusade against the Muslims. Chaucer, who describes the conjunction of 1385, also in “The Franklin’s Tale” was using his Toledan Tables, long after they had been replaced, in the rest of Europe, with the Alfonsine Tables, or versions derived from it:

“His Tables Tolletanes forth he brought,

Ful wel corected, ne ther lakked nought.”

Alfonso X the Wise

The movement of translation and scientific creativity during the reign of Alfonso X the Wise of Castile (1252–1277) is also associated with Toledo, even the court itself had no fixed place of residence. Associated with Toledo were the King’s two most prominent Jewish scientists, Judah Mosca (fl 1231–1272) and Isaac ibn Sid (“Rabiçag,” fl. 1263–1277). Judah Mosca worked with William the Englishman on a Latin translation of al-Zarqalluh’s Treatise on the Saphea in 1231, and translated various astrological and astronomical works from Arabic into Castilian, including Ibn Abi Rijal’s Kitab al bari‘ fi akhkam al-nujum (Libro conplido en los iudizios de las estrellas) and ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi’s Kitab al-kawakib al-thabita al-musawwar (Los IIII libros de las estrellas de la ochaua esfera). Mosca and Rabiçag together composed the Alfonsine Tables, a work which included some direct observation, finished in 1277. Isaac ibn Sid was particularly adept at instrumentation, writing volumes on the astrolabe, the plane astrolabe, the quadrant, and four on different types of clocks.

Toledo: Capital of Black Magic

Toledo’s reputation for black magic was owing to the association of Arabic alphabet and numerals with magical talismans. Because of the association of Arabic learning with astrology and alchemy, Toledo became linked in the popular imagination with magic and anyone studying there was de facto open to the accusation of necromancy. *Michael Scot, for one, who was in Toledo in the twelfth century, was never able to shake thereafter the suspicion that he had learned the Black Arts there. Scot’s reputed wizardry, moreover, was of a specifically mathematical cast. There are many references: Caesar of Heisterbach tells two stories of students studying the “arte nigromantia” “apud Toletum.” In medieval French, “jouer les arts de Tolède” was a common term for running confidence games or card sharking:

“Il fait d’un coq une poulette

Il joue les arts de Tolète.”

[He turned a rooster into a hen/he knows the arts of Toledo.]

How Toledo Got its Reputation

Toledo under al-Ma‘mun did not have the outsized reputation in the Islamic world as a science center that it would later have throughout Christian Europe. Rather the process took around one hundred years and thus, in a sense, Toledo rode the crest of apocalyptic fervor attending the great conjunction of 1186 to world fame. The conjunction provided, in other words, an advertisement for Toledo’s prowess in Arabic numbers, astronomical tables, astrolabes, astrological theory, and translations of manuals into Latin to master these new techniques. Toledo did not make the Toledan Tables famous: the Tables and the Letter of Toledo made the city famous, as both began their twin careers in the same decade. The Tables were compiled in the around 1080. Early in the twelfth century a small group of prescient European scholars reached Toledo. When they returned home they diffused a new kind of science, stressing math ematics, astronomy and astrology, whose key technical appurtenances were the tables—zijat—and the astrolabe. They in turn introduced the new program into a wider circle embracing all the courts of Europe.

Al-Zarqalluh’s Latinized tables found a huge market very quickly owing to the pent-up demand for accuracy in prognostications. In subsequent recensions of the Letter of Toledo, therefore, the phrase “all the philosophers and astronomers of Toledo,” or variants thereof, simply meant: “the Toledan Tables stand behind this prediction as a guarantee of its accuracy.” Whatever the precise reasons for Toledo’s reputation as capital of European science, by the 1190s that reputation was set. An anonymous manuscript containing the words of an enigmatic “Virgil, philosopher of Córdoba,” asserted that “apud civitatem toletanam essent studia instructa omnium artium per multum tempus” (in the city of Toledo studies of all the arts have been imparted for a long time).

See also Astrology; Astronomy, Islamic; Magic and the occult; Planetary tables

Bibliography

Burnett, Charles. The Introduction of Arabic Learning into England. London: The British Library, 1997.

Gil, José S. La escuela de traductores de Toledo y sus colaboradores judíos. Toledo: Instituto Provincial de Investigaciones y Estudios Toledanos, 1985.

Grauert, H. von. “Meister Johann von Toledo.” In Sitzungsberichtes der (…) historische. Classe der Kgl. Bayer. Akademie der Wissenschaften. Munich: G. Franz, 1901.

Gregory, Tullio. “Temps astrologique et temps chrétien.” In Mundana Sapientia: Forme di conoscenza nella cultura medievale. Rome, 1992, pp. 329–346.

McGinn, Bernard. Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979, pp. 152–153.

Southern, R.W. Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing: 3. History as Prophecy. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series (1972) 22: 159–180.

Waxman, Samuel M. Chapters on Magic in Spanish Literature. Bulletin Hispanique (1916) 38.

Weber, Michael C. “The Translating and Adapting of al-Farabi’s Kitab ihsa al-‘ulum in Spain.” Unpub. Doctoral diss. Boston University, 1996.

THOMAS F. GLICK

Torrigiano De’ Torrigiani

Pietro Torrigiani (Turisanus), Italian physician, was born in Florence between 1270 and 1280. He studied medicine at the University of Bologna where he was a pupil of the Florentine physician *Taddeo Alderotti. Between 1305 and 1319 he studied and taught in Paris.

Torrigiani’s most famous work is an elaborate commentary on Microtegni by *Galen, Plusquam commentum, written before 1319. He also wrote a short treatise, De hypostasi urine. Plusquam commentum may be regarded as a statement of his teaching activity. It is not a simple account of the text by Galen, but presents a certain scientific originality, incorporating material concerning philosophy and natural science. At times it promotes new interpretations of classic topics of medieval medicine. Torrigiani depicts medicine as an active science that is divided into two parts: a theoretical part that is an intellectual speculation on the human body’s foundations, and a practical part intended to produce physical change through therapeutic treatment. Torrigiani also deals with the scientific method. Following in the tradition of *Robert Grosseteste and *Albertus Magnus, Torrigiani examines the processes of resolution (demonstration termed propter quid) and composition (demonstration termed quia) applied to medical science methodology. Torrigiani frequently cites ancient authorities, in particular biological works by Aristotle and the medical doctrines by Galen concerning humors, elements, and complexion. He knew of these through the Canon and De animalibus of *Ibn Sina (Avicenna), classical sources of medieval medicine.

Like other members of the medical school of Bologna, Torrigiani engages in the medical-philosophical debate about *Aristotelianism and Galenism, discussing their differences and the possibility of their reconciliation. Unlike nearly all his contemporary physicians and philosophers, however, he sometimes takes doctrinal positions that favor the medical tradition, as represented by the anatomical and physiological knowledge contained in the work of Galen. These positions are more inclined toward safeguarding the methodological and theoretical autonomy of medicine than natural philosophy. An example of this occurs in Torrigiani’s discussion of the Aristotelian doctrine of the supremacy of the heart over the other main organs. Torrigiani expresses great reservations about such cardiocentrism, stating that the brain, the liver, and the testicles have autonomous activity. Nevertheless, Torrigiani does not share Galen’s view that such organs should all be placed on the same hierarchical level, since the function of the heart is clearly more important in its own right than that of the other organs. Torrigiani also takes issue with Aristotle about the role of the testicles in procreation. Aristotle thought that they had only the secondary role of delaying the emission of sperm, and that their role was similar to that of the counterweights on a loom. Torrigiani, however, took the view that the testicles, after receiving from the heart the spiritus generativus, are able to complete their operations on their own, particularly the conversion of blood into sperm.

In the Middle Ages embryology was one of the subjects that most deeply divided medicine and philosophy and brought some of the sharpest methodological and doctrinal confrontations between the two fields of study. One of the main reasons for the controversy was that all contemporary theories were derived either from Aristotle on one side or from *Hippocrates and Galen on the other. Regardless of which side they favored, medieval authors felt compelled to write conciliationes reconciling their own views with those of the other auctoritas. Like other pupils of Alderotti, Torrigiani’s idea of conception and the formation of embryos is basically Aristotelian. Male and female are the two distinct principles of generation. The male is the active principle, the female the passive: The former has the generation principle, the latter simply supplies the substance to be molded, that is to say menstrual blood. Torregiani is important in the history of medieval scientific thought because he moved beyond the stylized conciliatio toward independent examination and judgment of the authorities in conflict.

See also Elements and qualities; Generation; Medicine, practical; Medicine, theoretical; Nature: diverse medieval interpretations; Scholasticism

Bibliography

Primary Source

Plusquam commentum in Parvam Galeni Artem Turisani Florentini medici…, apud Juntas, Venetiis 1557.

Secondary Sources

Martorelli Vico, Romana. Medicina e filosofia. Per una storia dell’embriologia medievale nel XIII e XIV secolo. Milano: Guerini e Associati, 2002.

Ottosson, Per-Gunnar. Scholastic Medicine and Philosophy. A study of Commentaries on Galen’s Tegni (ca. 1300–1450). Napoli: Bibliopolis, 1984.

Sarton, George. Introduction to the History of Science. III/1. Medicine. Washington: Carnegie Institution, 1948, pp. 839–840.

Siraisi, Nancy. Taddeo Alderotti and his Pupils. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.

Villani, Filippo. Liber de civitatis Florentia famosis civibus. Firenze: G.C. Galletti, 1848, pp. 26–29.

ROMANA MARTORELLI VICO

Translation Movements

A comparative survey of medieval scientific translation movements (Greek into Arabic, Arabic into Latin, Hebrew, and European vernaculars) reveals some common patterns. The early phases of translation were marked by a preference for astrological treatises. But the immediate practical demand for astrological materials does not in itself satisfy the search for motive because the common pattern in these translation movements was for interest to quickly broaden out from *astrology and hermetic sciences generally to embrace the whole corpus of Greek or Greco-Arabic science.

Greek into Arabic

Gutas argues that the origins of Arab interest in Greek science are intimately bound up with the political ideology of the early Abbasid caliphs. When the Abbasids, who came to power in 750, removed the capital of the Islamic empire from Damascus to Baghdad in 764, they fell heir to the scholarly and historical traditions of the Sassanids who had formerly ruled in Persia and Mesopotamia. In order to co-opt the Persian elite, the Abbasids portrayed themselves as successors to the imperial ideology of ancient Persia, one of whose cornerstones was the notion that Zoroaster had urged the preservation of all of the sciences of antiquity. Translation was thus deemed a worthy enterprise in itself and the Sassanids had already absorbed Aristotelian physics and logic well before the Islamic conquest. Moreover, political astrology—the notion that both history and politics could be interpreted by observation of celestial movements—was at the very core of Sassanid ideology. The Abbasids co-opted the Persian elites by translating the entire corpus into Arabic, including Zoroastrian texts which they used to argue against the same elites. In the bargain came an appreciation of secular knowledge.

The second ideological leg of the Abbasid translation movement was a deliberate policy of attraction directed at the large Greek-speaking Christian minorities of the Levant. In the reign of al-Ma’mun (809–833) the Byzantine Empire had entered a period of intellectual obscurantism and closure; classical texts were no longer copied. Al-Ma’mun, who had read Greek classics as a youth (and had, as a result internalized the values of the translation movement), justified the Abbasid war on Byzantium to his Greek-speaking subjects as a retrieval of the classical heritage. Byzantine decadence became a leitmotif among Muslim intellectuals, as Ibn Ridwan noted that al-Ma’mun had breathed new life into Greek medicine, while al-Jahiz decried the Byzantines as superstitious idolaters.

The Abbasid *Bayt al-Hikma is frequently referred to as a school of translators, but it was not a school. It is simply the Arabic name for a Sassanid palace library. In the Abbasid court, it was likewise a royal library where, in its early phase, books relating to Persian history and culture were translated. Under al-Ma’mun, mathematics and astronomy were added (Gutas, 83).

Early demand for astronomy (as in the transmission both of *Ptolemy’s cosmological theories and of the Indian zijat or astronomical tables, particularly the Siddhanta, known in the Arabic world as the Sindhind), astrology, and mathematics (in particular Indian numerals, including the zero, and place unit system) produced the critical mass (both of texts and scholars) that generated demand for the translation of philosophy, leading to the rapid absorption of the entire Aristotelian corpus. The process fed on itself: the study of the first texts translated generated original treatises in Arabic commenting on them and refining technical vocabulary, which in turn required more accurate translations. These new scholars themselves became patrons of further translations (Gutas, 108, 110, 117).

The Arabic translation movement was associated with a technical innovation, *paper, introduced from China to Persia in the mid-eighth century, contemporaneous with the beginning of the translation movement. Paper made it possible to make copies on demand, at a reasonable price. Unlike the later Latin movement, which was executed on parchment, copied on a limited basis in monastic scriptoria, the Arabic movement was democratic and commercialized: the customer went to a book dealer and ordered a scribal copy of a manuscript which the dealer owned or had access to.

Arabic into Latin

The Latin translation movement of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries has not been successfully theorized. One hypothesis is that the interest in science was owing to a new social class—merchants—who were seeking a new kind of knowledge congruent with their world view (Gutas, 4). This solution cannot be sustained, first because the early translators were overwhelmingly churchmen; and second, because the undeniable merchant interest in precise measurement—of goods, time, and value—expressed in commercial arithmetic and the emergence of a theory of economic value, only found expression in the fourteenth century—much too late to explain the translation movement of the twelfth.

The inception of the movement can be dated to the Muslim loss of Zaragoza to the forces of Alfonso I of Aragon in 1110. That promoted a substantial inflow of foreign clerics in the Ebro Valley which became a focus of translation along with *Toledo, where much of the library, rich in scientific books, of the Beni Hud rulers of Zaragoza had been transferred. In the Ebro Valley, Robert of Ketton, an English archdeacon in Pamplona and his collaborator *Hermann of Carinthia produced a series of translations, particularly on astrological subjects (although Hermann also translated *Euclid’s Elements and *al-Khwarizmi’s important astronomical tables). Hermann’s 1143 original work, the De essentiis, was the first application of Arabic astrology to Latin metaphysics. Hermann was a link between Robert, *Hugh of Santalla and Rudolph of Bruges—a distinctive northern group of translators, focused on astrology and astronomy (Burnett, 1977). The early seep of Arabic science into the Latin world was practical, linked to the astrolabe and simple (as opposed to abstract) mathematics. The first translator associated with Toledo was *John of Seville, who also began his career translating astronomy and astrology. He translated *Abu Ma‘shar’s astrology in 1133, influencing *Hermann of Carinthia’s translation of the same work in 1140. Here we observe the same process as in the antecedent Greek-into-Arabic movement: multiple translations of key works, promoting constant refinement both of concepts and of terminology, as well as increasing mastery of Arabic. The mid-century activity in Toledo is variously said to have been centered around the Archbishop Raymond, ostensibly the patron of the group of translators; but Lemay regards John of Seville as the focal point; while Burnett promotes the candidacy of *Domingo Gundisalvo.

As in the Arab East, two approaches to translation existed side-by-side. *Boethius, based on his experience with translating from Greek into Latin, provided a long-lived rationale for literal, de verbo ad verbum translation which continued to be followed especially for Scriptural texts: one Latin word only was to be provided for each Greek word, and the word order could not be changed. It would have been presumptuous to do otherwise. The problem with Arabic is that its syntax and vocabulary, unlike those of Greek, were completely foreign to them. Thus, Hugh of Santalla observed:

“Often the translator gasps under the strain of the difficulties. He sees some strange word which resists being translated correctly because of either the variety of diacritical marks on the letters, or the lack of marks—often, too, because of the incompatible differences of languages in [each] of which the significance of the roots is different.” (Burnett, 1997, 60)

Moreover, Arabic was prolix where Greek was terse, or so it seemed to the translators, some of whom viewed Arabic prolixity positively (because it made concepts easier to grasp), while at the same time it made de verbo ad verbum translations virtually impossible. The translators struggled with a Latin that could not adequately replicate the richness of Arabic expression. Thus in his translation of *Ibn Sina’s Metaphysics, Gundisalvo was obliged to use esse (“to be”) to represent thirty-four different Arabic expressions (Jolivet, 118).

Political astrology, which was the focus at least of the early translation movement, just as it had been in the East, was a fad. All rulers had court astrologers, some going so far as to take them into battle to check on the signs for each strategic move. It became part of the baggage of the nobleman not only to commission nativities and other auguries, but also to own an astrolabe and a set of tables (whether he used them or not). Translation itself might also be used as a political weapon. Translations commissioned by *Frederick II of Sicily, such as *Michael Scot’s translations of *Ibn Rushd and also, interestingly enough, the Latin translation of *Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, were part of a deliberate policy to promote rationalist texts that were threatening to his papal enemies. In the wake of that translation, a short mathematical text of Maimonides on asymptotes (two lines that draw ever closer to one another without meeting) was rendered into Latin by Master John of Palermo as De duabus lineis. So here is an example of problem in theoretical mathematics that was translated from Arabic into Latin as an epiphenomenon of Frederick’s war on the papacy (Freudenthal).

Arabic into Castilian

In general translations from Arabic into European vernaculars were not direct, but mediated by Latin or Hebrew versions. The Castilian movement was therefore something of an exception and was similar in dynamics to the Arab-into-Latin or Hebrew movements, with a similar focus on astrology and practical astronomy made more complex by the dynamic of vernacularization which embraces translation, as well as direct creation. In social terms, translation from Arabic directly or indirectly into vernacular languages, implies the diffusion of the new “Greco-Arabic” science beyond the circle of Latinate clerics or persons trained by them.

Although some scientific and medical texts had been written vernacular languages before the thirteenth century, notably in Anglo-Saxon England, the practice did not become widespread until the translation movement from Arabic in Latin had changed the content of science to the extent that demand for wider access was felt. Because Jews were more fluent in the vernacular languages than they were in Latin, they were as prominent in the thirteenth-century movement of translation from Arabic into Castilian, associated with the court of *Alfonso X the Wise (reigned 1252–1284), as they had been in the twelfth-century Latin movement. Indeed Américo Castro (1954, 490) went so far as to claim that “Castilian came into use as an instrument of high culture thanks to the Jews who surrounded [Alfonso X] and excited his extremely refined curiosity.” Alfonso is also associated with a “school” of translators. It was not a school, more like a government translation bureau, where the king presided over the effort in science for which he recruited Jewish astronomers such as Isaac ibn Sid and Yehuda ben Moshe. Castilian was poor in abstract terms, so Alfonso’s team created abstract nouns, creating a literary scientific language whose literalism, as had been true of Arabic translators from the Greek, was less a reflection of incompetence than the result of experimentation with new concepts.

Translations from the Arabic included Judah ibn Moshe’s translation of ‘Ali ibn Abi’l-Rijal’s Kitab al-baric fi ahkam al-nujum (Libro conplido de los iudizios de las estrellas), on judicial astrology. Al-Sufi’s Kitab suwar alkawakib al-thamaniya wa’l-arbacin (Book of Forty-eight Constellations of the Stars) was one of the principal sources of Los IIII libros de las estrellas de la ochaua esfera, but the Alfonsine translators added other materials. Alfonso’s method to have his translator/astronomers embellish on original texts and to use more than one source, as in the Ochaua esfera or the Lapidario, a collection of astrology treatises.

Arabic into Hebrew

Jews had virtually no participation in science in antiquity and were not drawn into the realm of classical science until the advent of Islam, when they participated in the Greek-into-Arabic translation movement and the early philosophical movement, in which all Arab speakers—ahl lisanina (“the people of our language”), as *al-Kindi put it—were welcomed. Arabic-speaking Jewish intellectuals were in awe of Arabic science. As Moses ibn Ezra (the great poet from Granada) observed:

“They have translated into Arabic all the sciences, ancient as well as modern, which they have appropriated and accomplished with explanations and clarifications. No nation has composed or translated such a quantity in the domain of science as has been translated and written by this nation. They were able to do this thanks to the richness of their language and the excellence of its rhetoric” (Barkai, 10).

Hebrew science—that is, science written in or translated into Hebrew—was an invention of two twelfth-century rabbi-savants, *Abraham bar Hiyya of Barcelona and *Abraham ibn Ezra of Tudela, whose scientific specialties of mathematics, astronomy, and astrology became Jewish specialties in Spain, but not elsewhere in the Arab world. In order to justify these activities, Bar Hiyya and Ibn Ezra both claimed that they were merely retrieving the “lost” science of the ancient Hebrews, a science which the gentiles had stolen from them—a myth of which they were perhaps the most influential perpetuators. Part of the myth was that the rabbis had kept their scientific method secret because it was the same method used in judicial astrology (Roth, Sela). When confronted with technical Arabic scientific terms, Ibn Ezra liked to represent them in Hebrew with words chosen from the lexicon of Biblical Hebrew. This strategy can be termed “Judaization,” defined as an attempt to provide all aspects of social life and culture with a Jewish tradition stretching back to the Bible or, at least, the Talmud. Ibn Ezra was extreme in his willingness to stretch the meaning of Biblical expressions to fit concepts of Arabic science. He searched the Bible for “‘original’ Hebrew words endowed with scientific meaning, avoiding the creation of new Hebrew words based on cognate Arabic words or on loan translations of Arabic words” (Sela, 70).

As in the contemporaneous Latin translation movement, the early focus of Hebrew science and translation was astrology. Abraham ibn Ezra was the first Jewish author to interpret Biblical events astrologically “and to explain certain biblical commandments as defenses against the pernicious influence of the stars.” He lived and worked in Tudela at the same time as Robert of Ketton, who had similar interests, was a canon in the Cathedral of Pamplona and when Hugh of Santalla was translating astrological treatises under the patronage of Michael, bishop of nearby Tarazona. In Spain during the twelfth century, “astrology had, among Jews, become the favored means of interpreting religious history and theology in a naturalistic manner” (Sela). The common focus of the Ebro translators and Ibn Ezra on astrology and the simultaneity of their activities, suggest a unified movement of transmission of Arabic science in two different languages, and with somewhat different justifications.

Ibn Ezra’s role in the reception of Arabic astrology in Europe was singular. Judicial astrology, the ahkam alnujam of the Arabs—judgments of the stars—was introduced by Ibn Ezra simultaneously in both Hebrew and Latin, using the terms mishpatim and iudicia, respectively. He introduced the term mishpatim in his Hebrew translation of Ibn al-Muthanna’s commentaries on *al-Khwarizmi’s astronomical tables. The Arabic original of this important treatise has been lost; it has been studied from one Latin and two Hebrew translations that survive. The Latin translation is Hugh of Santalla’s. Abraham directed his Hebrew scientific writings to professional Jewish astrologers, people to whom he referred as ba’alé ha-mishpatim (masters of astrological judgments) or hakhmé mishpete mazalot (scholars of zodiacal judgments). He also wrote for Christian professionals, whom he called doctores or magistri iudiciorum, in particular his Book of Astronomical Tables, and another volume, The Book of the Fundamentals of Tables, which explained how to use them. He wrote four versions of the latter, two in Hebrew (lost) and two in Latin, which survive. This book’s approach is observational, rather than mathematical. That is, he expected his readers to be able to use an astrolabe, about which he had also written a user’s manual (Sela).

The switch from Arabic to Hebrew began with the Almohade dispersion of Arabic-speaking Jews from al-Andalus to the Spanish Christian kingdoms and to Provence, the destination of Judah ibn Tibbon (Hebrew translator of the Arabic works of Maimonides).

Arabic into Chinese

Of course, Arabic scientific ideas also moved eastwards contemporaneously with their westward movement. In this light, Ibn al-Nadim (*Fihrist, 31) reports *al-Razi’s anecdote about a Chinese man who had stayed with him in Baghdad for a year and, before leaving for home, asked al-Razi to dictate the sixteen books of *Galen to him. Al-Razi, along with students of his, complied after the man explained that he used a kind of shorthand for such projects. Al-Razi’s anecdote appears to have been atypical. Chinese interest in Arabic science really did not gain momentum until the mid-thirteenth century and was mainly focused on calendrical applications of astronomy. The Il-khan ruler Hulagu was said to have “loved science and was infatuated with astronomy and geometry” (Allsen, 162). Astronomers from both China and the Islamic world frequented his court and around 1260 he ordered the construction of an observatory at Maraghah with Nasir al-Din *al-Tusi as its first director. Al-Tusi, together with Muslim and Chinese colleagues composed the “Il-khani Tables” (Zij i Il-khani), which had conversion tables for the Chinese, and other, calendars and seems to have been designed for administrators who had to convert dates from one system to another. The Chinese had been impressed by the accuracy of Muslim astronomical observations and Kublai Khan established an Office of Western Astronomy in 1263 with the Syrian Isa kelemechi as its head. This bureau was succeeded by an Observatory that Kublai founded for Muslim astronomers in 1271 with Jamal al-Din as director. The two astronomical traditions, Arabic and Chinese, were kept separate so that their results could be checked against each other. Although a few Arabic works were translated into Chinese there was no impact on Chinese astronomy or mathematics. In Medicine, notwithstanding Razi’s anecdote, the theoretical basis of Chinese medicine in yin-yang and the Five Phases proved a solid barrier to the diffusion of Greco-Arabic humoral pathology. Only in Materia Medica can borrowing be detected. The use of rhubarb as a purgative spread from China through the Islamic World to Europe, while Arabic pharmacological recipes were translated into Chinese in the early Ming period.

Conclusion

Practical concerns provided the focus for at least the early phases of all the movements discussed—in particular issues related to the astronomical determination of the calendar (e.g., the advent of the new moon in Christianity and Judaism, or problems related to luni-solar issues, in China) or in the Islamic world, the determination of the qibla (the direction of Mecca) and canonical prayer times; and astrology. What drove all this movements was the tremendous explanatory and predictive power in the new package of practical astronomy (Ptolemaic theory; Indian-inspired tables, and the refined astrolabe) which made the prediction of celestial movements not only more accurate but which was also accessible to persons of modest education.

China constitutes something of an exception, not only because of the cultural barriers to the diffusion of the Greco-Arabic corpus, but also because the phenomenon has not attracted as much scholarly interest as it merits

See also Translation norms and practice; Vocabulary

Bibliography

Barkai, Ron. A History of Jewish Gynaecological Texts in the Middle Ages. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1998.

Burnett, Charles. A Group of Arab-Latin Translators Working in Northern Spain in the mid-12th Century. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1977): 62–108.

———. “Translating from Arabic into Latin in the Middle Ages: Theory, Practice, and Criticism.” In S. G. Lofts and P.W. Rosemann, eds. Editer, traduire, interpéter: Essais de méthodologie philosophique. Louvain: Peeters, 1997, pp. 55–78.

Castro, Américo. The Structure of Spanish History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954.

Freudenthal, Gad. “Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed and the Transmission of the Mathematical Tract, ‘On Two Asymptotic Lines’ in the Arabic, Latin and Hebrew Traditions.” In R. S. Cohen and H. Levine, eds. Maimonides and the Sciences. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000, pp. 35–56.

Glick, Thomas F. “‘My Master, The Jew’: Observations on Interfaith Scholarly Interaction in the Middle Ages.” In Harvey J. Hames, ed. Jews, Muslims and Christians In and Around the Crown of Aragon. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2004, pp. 157–182.

Gutas, Dmitri. Greek Thought, Arabic Culture. New York: Routledge, 1998, pp. 29–59.

Jolivet, Jean. “The Arabic Inheritance.” In P. Dronke, ed. A History of Twelfth-Century Western Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 113–148.

Lemay, Richard. Abu Ma‘shar and Latin Aristotelianism in the Twelfth Century: The Recovery of Aristotle’s Natural Philosophy through Arabic Astrology. Beirut: American University, 1962.

Roth, Norman. The ‘Theft of Philosophy’ by the Greeks from the Jews. Classical Folia (1978) 32: 53–67.

Sela, Shlomo. El papel de Abraham ibn Ezrá en la divulgación de los ‘juicios’ de la astrología en las lenguas hebrea y latina. Sefarad (1999) 59: 159–183.

———. Abraham Ibn Ezra and the Rise of Medieval Hebrew Science. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2003.

THOMAS F. GLICK

Translation Norms and Practice

Essential for the advancement of medieval Western science and technology were translations that not only restored the full riches of ancient Greek scientific culture but also introduced the latest discoveries and theories of scientists writing in Arabic. Medieval scientists were well aware of the necessity for accessing works in other languages. *Roger Bacon emphasized several times that, for science and philosophy, one must know Greek, Hebrew and Arabic. He criticized extant translations for their failure to do justice to the original authors, but most scholars felt no need to learn foreign languages, and were happy to trust in the accuracy of translations. There were three main areas in which Latin culture was regarded as particularly lacking: mathematics, medicine, and philosophy. From the late-eleventh century a concerted effort was made to remedy this lack. First, *Constantine the African and his collaborators in *Salerno and *Monte Cassino established a comprehensive corpus of Latin texts in medicine by translating works on the theory and practice of medicine by doctors (Christian, Jewish, and Muslim) writing in Arabic. Then, in the second quarter of the twelfth century, the movement to translate from Arabic and Greek works on *arithmetic (calculation with Hindu-Arabic numerals, *algebra, and trigonometry), geometry (*Euclid’s Elements), and the science of the stars (astronomical tables, *Ptolemy’s Almagest and Tetrabiblos, and a host of astrological texts) got underway almost simultaneously in northeast Spain, Sicily, and the Crusader States. By the mid-twelfth century *Toledo had become the undisputed center for the translation of scientific works from Arabic, thanks to the combined efforts of *Gerard of Cremona and *Domingo Gundisalvo, who added philosophy to their interests. Gerard was responsible for the Latin texts which became the bases for the Western curriculum in medicine (*Ibn Sina’s Canon and several works by *Galen), astronomy (al-Farghani and *Ptolemy), and natural philosophy (Aristotle and his Greek commentators), while Gundisalvo and his colleagues concentrated on psychology and metaphysics. Meanwhile, the full corpus of Aristotle’s works was being pieced together, mainly directly from Greek, and this was complemented, from the early thirteenth century onwards, by Latin versions of the detailed commentaries by Averroes (*Ibn Rushd). By the mid-thirteenth century, just at the time when the *universities were getting started, the major translations had been completed. It was at this stage that Roger Bacon could criticize the translators, Gerard of Cremona and his successors *Alfred of Sareschel, *Michael Scot, and Hermann the German for their inadequacies. One of these was the dependence on Arabic versions of Greek texts, which was remedied by *William of Moerbeke in the late-thirteenth century (for Aristotle’s works) and *Niccolò da Reggio in the early fourteenth century (for Galen). In the Renaissance, medieval translations were criticized for the barbarity of their Latin, and new attempts were made to render into humanistic Latin the authorities that were the staple of higher education.

There were two contrasting models of translation that medieval translators could follow, those of Cicero and *Boethius. Cicero described how he translated Greek “not as an interpreter (interpres), but as an orator (orator),” by which he meant not rendering “word for word, but [preserving] the general style and force of the language. For I do not think that I ought to count them out to the reader like coins, but to pay them by weight, as it were” (De optimo genere oratorum, V, 14–15). In deliberate reaction to this “rhetorical” translation, Boethius defended his decision to translate as a “faithful interpreter” (fidus interpres) when dealing with non-literary works, “since,” he writes, “I have rendered each (Greek) word by a word extracted and obtained from it. The reason for this approach is that, in these writings, in which knowledge of things is sought, it is not the charm of limpid speech, but the unsullied truth that has to be expressed. Therefore I feel I have been most useful if, in the books of philosophy composed in the Latin language, through the integrity of a completely full translation, no Greek literature is found to be needed any longer” (In Isagogen Porphyrii Commentorum Editio secunda, ch. 1). Boethius’s model tended to prevail among medieval translators. Among the most strenuous advocates of the ad verbum (or literal) style over the ad sensum (or rhetorical) style was *Burgundio of Pisa (d. 1193), who justified this method in prefaces to his translations of theological texts from Greek. He repeats the point that, for the translation of theological and scientific works, the ad verbum translation is to be aimed at, even at the expense of elegant Latin style, adding that any departure from this ideal must be regarded as presumptuous interference on the part of the translator, and he cites as models the translations of the Septuagint, of Justinian’s Law Code, and the versions of Aristotle’s logical texts made by Boethius. Burgundio put this method into practice in his translations of works by Aristotle and Galen, and the ad verbum style was followed by his colleague *James of Venice, by William of Moerbeke (who revised his own translations in the direction of literalness), and the majority of medieval Greek-Latin translators. *Robert Grosseteste, for example, has been described as producing “scholarly editions of the [Greek] texts. Besides the text itself, he provides manuscript variants, any Greek commentaries available and notes of his own…. For the use of a Western audience the texts had to be in some kind of Latin. But beyond that they are not designed to be read or referred to like translations” (Dionisotti, p. 28). In keeping with Burgundio’s criticism of presumptuousness, most literal translators not only did not add anything of their own; they did not even include their own names on their translations.

To translate word for word from Arabic presented a greater challenge, since the structure of the Arabic language was so different from that of Latin. The incompatibility of its vocabulary with that of Latin and the ambiguities of its written form made it particularly difficult to translate, while the “prolixity” by which it was frequently characterized justified abbreviation in the eyes of some translators. Constantine the African tended to abbreviate by missing out passages of the Arabic medical texts he translated, while *Hermann of Carinthia and his colleagues in northeast Spain, under the influence of the French schools, aimed at writing succinct and elegant Latin versions. Nevertheless, the ad verbum method became regarded as the norm. The translations of Gerard of Cremona are exceeding literal, to the extent of retaining Arabic syntax in the Latin, and transliterating Arabic terms where no direct Latin equivalent could be found. It is often evident, however, that the translator, while preserving his fidelity to the original in the body of the text, has added glosses rephrasing more obscure passages, and explaining the meanings of Arabic terms. Sometimes these glosses are prefaced by the words “Sensus huius littere est…,’ i.e., they give the sense, while the text gives the letter. The literalness extends to the careful copying of diagrams and illustrations in the original texts, especially in geometry and medicine.

Another difference between Greek–Latin and Arabic–Latin translations is the more frequent recourse in the latter case to interpreters. Most Christian translators from Arabic are associated with an Arabic speaker (usually a Jew). Gerard of Cremona is said to have “Latinized” the Almagest, while the Mozarab Ghalib “interpreted” it for him. More telling is the testimony of the Jew Avendauth, who states that he “took the lead and translated the words one at a time into the vernacular language, and Archdeacon Dominicus [Gundisalvo] turned them one at a time into Latin” (Preface to Avicenna, On the Soul). The vernacular could have been the spoken Arabic of Toledo, or the local Romance, and the ad verbum method is clearly alluded to. In the third quarter of the thirteenth century, under the patronage of *Alfonso X, king of Castile and León, the vernacular versions (Arabic texts on astronomy, astrology, and magic, translated into Castilian largely by Jews) achieved literary status. The substantial body of (mainly) more popular scientific texts in European vernaculars outside the Iberian peninsula derive directly or indirectly from the Latin versions.

It is probable that native speakers provided the main resource for the translators’ knowledge of their source languages (unless they were bilingual themselves). Dictionaries and grammars played a lesser part. The Arabic–Latin glossaries that survive (the “Leiden glossary” of the twelfth century and the Vocabulista in Arabico of the mid-thirteenth) are more likely to have been aids for missionaries, whilst the extensive lists of “synonyma,” often in several languages, helped doctors to identify materia medica. There is, however, more evidence of language aids in Greek. Grosseteste arranged for a Greek grammar to be written for him by John of Basingstoke, and a comprehensive Greek–Latin dictionary (London, College of Arms, MS Arundel 9) may be a copy of glossary revised by Grosseteste from a south Italian exemplar.

Jews, as well as being interpreters, established a scientific literature in Hebrew from the early-twelfth century onward, based largely on Arabic writings. Here, too, the question of translation method arose, of which the most conspicuous example is *Maimonides’ letter to Samuel Ibn Tibbon concerning the best way to translate his Guide to the Perplexed. Although Maimonides criticizes the literal method of translation, saying that “the translator should first try to grasp the sense of the subject thoroughly, and then state the theme with perfect clearness in the other language… changing the order of the words, putting many words for one word, or vice versa… so that the subject be perfectly intelligible in the language into which he translates,” the ad verbum style became the norm in Hebrew too. It was adopted by the prolific translators of the Tibbonid family and Calonymus ben Calonymus, and, ironically, it was these literal Hebrew translations of the Arabic commentaries on Aristotle by Averroes and medical texts by Avicenna that were used when Renaissance scholars wished to revise and complete the medieval translations, whose style so much displeased them.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Bacon, Roger. De utilitate grammaticae, edited by J.H. Bridges, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897 (see vol. I, pp. 66–69 and 81).

Boethius. In Isagogen Porphyrii Commentorum Editio secunda, ch. 1, edited by G. Schepss and S. Brandt. Vienna and Leipzig: F. Temsky, 1906.

Cicero. De optimo genere oratorum in Cicero, De inventione; De optimo genere oratorum; Topica, edited and translated by H.M. Hubbell. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968.

Maimonides. Letter to Samuel Ibn Tibbon. http://www.sacred-texts.com/jud/mhl/mhl19.htm

Secondary Sources

Contamine, Geneviève, ed. Traduction et traducteurs au moyen age. Paris: Éditions du Centre national de la recherché scientifique, 1989.

Copeland, Rita. Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Dionisotti, A. Carlotta. “On the Greek Studies of Robert Grosseteste.” In The Uses of Greek and Latin, eds. A.C. Dionisotti, A. Grafton and J. Kraye. London: Warburg Institute, 1988, pp. 19–40.

Ellis, Roger, ed. The Medieval Translator. 8 vols (so far), various publishers; from volume 5 onwards Turnhout: Brepols, 1987–2003.

Hamesse, J., ed. Les Traducteurs en travail: leurs manuscrits et leurs méthodes. Turnhout: Brepols, 2002.

Lofts, Steve G., and Philipp W. Rosemann. Editer, traduire, interpréter: Essais de méthodologie philosophique. Leuven and Paris: Peeters, 1997.

CHARLES BURNETT

Transportation

Transportation perhaps sits oddly in a volume dealing with medieval science, technology, and medicine, since it did not occupy a prominent position in the intellectual preoccupations of the time. Only in the consideration of lands and places far away did the issue of transport (how to get to these places, what lay there, etc.) enter into serious discourse. For issues closer to home, transport as an intellectual pursuit faded almost into oblivion. This is not to say that authorities and societies as a whole were not concerned about transport matters, but that these concerns operated almost solely on a practical level, responding to day-to-day challenges involved with the maintenance of transport systems rather than subjecting transport (and the policies regarding it) to anything like a broader, more abstract analysis.

A large part of this lay with the breakup of a strong coordinating regime in Europe from the collapse of the Roman Empire onwards. The smaller European states that eventually resulted, by and large, lacked the resources, the time, and the foresight to give transport anything but the most cursory attention. As a result, transport developments over the medieval period tended to be decided by a sort of natural selection, often steering a course between competing interests. Nowhere is this clearer than in the development of inland water transport systems. Water was one of the most contested resources in the Middle Ages (as it is today), being sought after by those who wanted river water for irrigation or hay production; by those who wished to use rivers as fisheries (particularly on the lower stretches of these rivers); by those who wished to use the power of rivers for mills; by those who wished to use rivers for essential waste disposal (particularly common for big cities such as London or Paris); and, finally, by those who wished to use rivers for boat transport. The balancing of these interests was reflected in myriad government and local pronouncements about—among other things—how far fishing nets could jut into streams; about the need of millers to maintain “flashes” (that is, removable sections of weirs) to allow a flow of water which boats could shoot when going downstream or be winched over when going upstream; about when water levels in rivers should be lowered to allow hay harvesting in riverside meadows; about the time when butchers in big cities like London could throw animal guts into the river so that the tide would flush them out to sea, and so on. Within this clamor of voices for water, only when commercial interests were at very high levels could rivers be kept sufficiently clear for the effective transporting of goods by boat. Although merchants often had the ear of government, royal pronouncements about keeping water systems open for commercial traffic almost always went unheeded unless local interests were sufficiently aligned with those of commercial traffickers to give this use of water a first priority. Sometimes this gave rise to complex compromises. One such was the Thames system in England, where not only were complicated agreements made with fishermen and mill-owners, but also in the development of specialized barges that could better negotiate the flashes at mill-weirs, such as the flat-bottomed boat which the English called a “shout”, a design probably borrowed from the Dutch who called such a boat a schuit.

Within this Darwinian-like context some transport adjustments were nonetheless very far-reaching. One very important one was the large-scale introduction of the horse to vehicle hauling, both for goods and people. It is true that such use of horses was known for vehicle-hauling in the Roman period, particularly in Gaul, but, with the collapse of the Roman Empire and, more pertinently, its vaunted system of paved roads, such haulage had to resort to the ox, whose slow, plodding but more relentless pulling power was more suited to the heavier hauling conditions on earthen roads. Only when a series of significant changes in the harnessing and care of equids coalesced around the time of the first millennium, featuring such things as the padded horse-collar and iron horse-shoes, did horses come in their own as haulage beasts. Their appearance in front of carts and wagons, particularly over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, certainly transformed the look and effectiveness of road transport, probably allowing goods to be hauled from place to place at about double the speed previously possible. Alongside the age-old use of horses as pack-animals, a certain quickening of transport resulted, coinciding with the well-known “commercial revolution” of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

A similar sort of phenomenon was occurring with water transport. Some of this has already been indicated for inland river transport, in the development of more specialized barges, but the key developments were occurring on salt water. One was certainly the development of sturdier oceangoing vessels, such as the squat northern European cog, a reflection of the marked commercial reorientation towards the North Sea that characterized most of the middle ages. Such regional ship developments were not totally self-contained, however, and the period from the thirteenth century onwards saw the fruitful blending of Mediterranean and northern European ship designs to create, among other types, the rugged and maneuverable carrack. This featured such changes as supplementing the square sails seen predominantly on northern waters with triangular lateen sails from the Mediterranean, allowing a greater effective in sailing against the wind while retaining the ability to withstand the stresses of oceanic travel. Certainly, carracks, caravels and galleons would literally provide the platform for European world exploration. Probably even more important than this, though, was the rise of what has been called “quantitative navigation,” centered mostly around the introduction of the compass to European waters in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries. This more methodical attitude to sea transport gradually saw the thirteenth-century introduction of portolan maps, with compass heading lines drawn from one port to another which mariners could follow; of astrolabes and quadrants to measure latitude by means of the sun or pole star in the fifteenth century; of sand-glasses, particularly useful in giving a sense of time passed in the crossing of the Mediterranean to provide warning if certain headlands were not spied at proper times, also developed in the fifteenth century; and the development of diaries or “rutters”, as they were called by the Dutch and English (originally from the French routier), which provided a more permanent record of the experience gained by sailors, once again occurring in the fifteenth century. Although a certain amount of patronage accompanied these developments, particularly from such august personages as Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal (1394–1460), most developed rather naturally out of the needs of mariners and merchants.

One should not, however, overestimate the changes made to transport over the medieval period. The infrastructure for land transport in particular was very rudimentary. Paved roads, which had provided the communications skeleton for the Roman Empire, were in very short supply in the Middle Ages. Indeed, the paving of roads and streets occurred as little islands around towns and cities. Similarly, although bridges probably existed in numbers similar to those found several centuries later in the eighteenth century (such at least is the finding of one author examining medieval English bridges), they were almost all (with some notable exceptions: see below) made of timber and likely to have been much more flimsy and narrow that those later. The common categorization of bridges into those passable by cart (the widest), by pack-horse and by foot (the narrowest), suggests that, even if their numbers were about the same as centuries later, they were more of a bottleneck to certain types of traffic. On the other hand, the extensiveness of the road system was impressive. Except for the modern autobahns and motor-ways, virtually all routes shown on road-maps today existed in the Middle Ages along with the bridges to service these routes. Indeed, if we consider the modern road system in Europe to be like the circulatory system of a healthy young adult, the same system in the medieval period would have a much more aged look (that is, with a higher level of arterial constriction), but we could still recognize the “individual.”

In short, transport in the Middle Ages often had an air of neglect about it. This neglect would be exacerbated by such things as tolls that landlords often charged at bridges or certain stretches of road. Tolls might have been beneficial in some instances—in the Alps, for example, it has been argued that the revenues from tolls were largely ploughed back into maintaining the material infrastructure of Alpine routes, and the same might have been said of the magnificent stone bridges sometimes built in the period (such as the great stone bridge crossing the Rhône at Avignon in France, begun in 1177), where tolls helped to defray maintenance costs of such structures. But in most cases the effect was parasitic as little of the revenues made its way back into the maintenance of the transport system. As mentioned above, this reflected the fact that transport was not in the forefront of intellectual concerns, perhaps partly because of the mainly spiritual concerns of the people at the time, certainly up to the turn of the first millennium. The travel or transport desiderata that existed for this period, such as in the “itineraries” common up to the twelfth century or the crude maps that were drawn during the period, pointed to a “literature” of curiosities rather than useful guides or tools for getting from place to place. The Crusades would signal a certain breaking out of this mold, and certainly the need for informed knowledge about the larger world would quicken afterwards, helped along by the Mongol expansion in the east. Even the catastrophic effects of the Black Death would not dampen this and indeed may have accelerated it even further, as people grew more accustomed to travel and began to expect more in the way of comfort. The development of inns as places of hospitality and conviviality was one reflection of this, as was the jolly traveling motif in such works as The Canterbury Tales by *Geoffrey Chaucer. Crucially, this popular embrace of travel and transport began to be accompanied by a more academic and systematic attitude to getting about. The period when navigation and other aspects of transport became truly “scientific” was still some ways off even by 1500, but the first steps in that direction had been taken.

The remaining portion of the Pont St.-Bénézet on the Rhône River at Avignon, France. (Corbis/Franz-Marc Frei)

See also Bridges; Canals; Navigation; Roads; Travel and exploration

Bibliography

Harrison, David. The Bridges of Medieval England. Clarendon Press: Oxford, 2004.

Langdon, John. Horses, Oxen, and Technological Innovation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Leighton, Albert C. Transport and Communication in Early Medieval Europe: A.D. 500–1100. Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1972.

McCormick, Michael. Origins of the European Economy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

McGrail, Seán. Ancient Boats in North-West Europe. London: Longman, 1987.

Spufford, Peter. Power and Profit: The Merchant in Medieval Europe. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002.

Unger, Richard W. The Ship in the Medieval Economy 600–1600. London: Croom Helm, 1980.

JOHN LANGDON

Travel and Exploration

The earliest expansion of Europe into worlds beyond its own borders was in the North Atlantic Ocean. Early Latin texts regarding the lives of Irish saints speak of the movement of brethren to some of the islands in the region, such as the Faeroes by 800 C.E., via the use of simple, wickerwork coracles. By the end of ninth century, however, Norse settlement had begun in earnest, and travel between Iceland and the Scandinavian mainland was in full force by 900 C.E. Norse movement, both in the Atlantic and, as raiders, in Atlantic and Mediterranean Europe, was made possible in part by their special skills in shipbuilding and, concomitantly, navigation. Usually slim, light, and propelled by rowed oars, the ships’ hulls were built by the clinker method: first a shell, then overlapping planking with joints made watertight by the use of resin-soaked wool. The Viking langskip or longship, which was used mostly for the coastal movement of people, supplies, horses, and troops, had, as the so-called Gokstad ship demonstrates, up to sixteen pairs of oars and was crewed by thirty-five men. These ships were masted and hoisted sail and were not only quite mobile but could be easily used as mobile fighting platforms. Likewise, the Vikings employed the knarr, a medium to large merchant vessel used primarily for trading rather than raiding. More oceanworthy than the longship, the knarr was also more efficient in that it needed a much smaller crew. This is not to imply that the Norse were only fighting sailors. Norse military technology was developed for land combat as well, the most important piece being the double-edged blade sword, used primarily as a slashing weapon, often imported from the Rhine valley and finished in Scandinavia.

Western pilgrims and merchants had been a presence in the Levant long before Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade in 1095. Indeed, it was not until the 1090s that the pilgrimage routes were closed. The crusades saw a confluence of mercantile, religious, and military interests that allowed for the establishment of a Latin beachhead and brought news of the Muslim world, its culture and technology into much greater relief for the West than had previously been possible. As a military operation, the crusades to the East required the development of large ships capable of equine transport, as well as food and weapons. The terrain of the region also required new forms of siege warfare and, most particularly, the development of new castle-building techniques which allowed for the construction of castles on hillocks with deep defiles, sheer cliffs, and uncertain water sources.

Following the Mongolian invasions of Eastern Europe in 1240–1242, western travelers who ventured into Asia were repeatedly astonished, not only by Asian technological sophistication, but by the ability of the Mongols to move craftsmen and technological specialists from one part of their vast empire to another. Western reports, such as those by William of Rubruck, made note of Italian physicians and shipwrights, French and Flemish goldsmiths, Greek and Scandinavian soldiers, German miners and Alan armorers operating in the “east” while Chinese artillerymen, stonemasons, and engineers operated in Mongol-occupied Iran. One of the most notable technological exchanges of the Latin-Mongol encounter was the presence of Genoese sailors and shipbuilders in the Persian Gulf in the fourteenth century, working on the construction of ships for use by a possible Il-Khanid navy. If it were not for the internecine fighting that broke out among the Italians, it is possible that the Iranian Mongols would have become a naval power in their own right.

It was also in the late thirteenth century that we find the development of one of the most important tools of travel, the portolan chart. Likely used as an aid in navigation, it demonstrates how the knowledge of the extra-Mediterranean world developed. They also are the first maps with notions of scale, proportion, and distance, something which had been lost in cartography since the Roman Empire. The 1321 world map of Pietro Vesconte is so well developed as to include city plans at scale. Travels by *Marco Polo and others to eastern Asia, and by the Portuguese in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries also came to be added to maps, extending Western geographical knowledge and conceptions even further. These were, of course, followed by the first Latin translation (c. 1406) of *Ptolemy’s Geography.

The Gokstad ship, one of the best preserved Viking longships, (built c. 850–900) is now preserved in the Viking Ship Museum, Oslo, Norway. (Corbis/Richard T. Nowitz)

It is an absolute certainty that Portuguese and Basque fishermen had been operating in the North Atlantic from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, if not before. Little is known of their techniques for navigation, other than oral knowledge and observational acuity of the patterns of tides and of migration patterns of cod. For the longer ocean voyages that the Spanish and Portuguese undertook officially in the fifteenth century, however, more ships, larger tonnages, and better ports were needed. The full-rigged ship, the carrack, was the most prominent of the larger vessels. Large, heavy, with a big spread of canvas, the carrack could support upwards of three watertight decks. The carrack was a workhorse, able to carry cargo of a thousand tons. The Santa Maria, one of *Columbus’s first three ships for his transatlantic voyage of 1492, was a carrack, while his other two ships, the Niña and the Pinta were of the smaller, caravel, variety of ship. Designed for the Portuguese coastal voyages around Africa, the caravels were slim and able to sail. Needing small crews, they were ideal for ventures into unknown waters. The magnetic compass, astrolabe, and quadrant made sailing by the stars a more accurate venture. While the need for sailing by dead reckoning continued through the invention and common use of the chronometer in the eighteenth century, the cultural exchanges that took place during the fifteenth century resulted in the importation of new plants and animals, and, with them, new techniques for growing and raising crops and husbandry. Often, however, we find that the technologies needed for successful transplantation were not always readily understood in their new biotas and, as a consequence, crop failures were often commonplace. Orange groves, for example, that Muslims had planted in southern Spain were initially allowed to grow fallow by Christian reconqerors, unfamiliar with the special techniques required for growing citrus. Likewise, omnivorous European pigs proved so dominant in Mexico that they forced out indigenous domestic animals overnight.

Transportation, military and agricultural technology all were instrumental in the history of European expansion and exploration in the Middle Ages, and European techniques were exported globally as seaborne empires expanded in the early modern period.

See also Geography, chorography; Shipbuilding

Bibliography

Allsen, Thomas T. Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia. Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Falk, Hjalmar. Altnordisches Seewesen. Wörter und Sachen 4. Heidelberg: Winter, 1912.

Edwards, Clinton. Design and Construction of Fifteenth-Century Iberian Vessels. The Mariner’s Mirror (1992) 78: 419–572.

Harley, J.B. and David Woodward, eds. The History of Cartography. Vol. 1: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Kennedy, Hugh. Crusader Castles. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Verdon, Jean. Travel in the Middle Ages. Transl. by George Holoch. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003.

Watson, Andrew M. Agricultural innovation in the early Islamic world: the diffusion of crops and farming techniques, 700–1100. Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

ADAM KNOBLER

Tusi, Nasir Al-Din Al-

Abu Ja‘far Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn al-Hasan Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (1201–1274) wrote approximately one hundred sixty-five treatises, in both Arabic and Persian, on such diverse topics as astronomy and *cosmology, mathematics (geometry and trigonometry), medicine, as well as philosophy, ethics, jurisprudence, *logic, and history. Little is known of his early years aside from what he reveals in his autobiographical Sayr wa-Suluk. Apparently as a young man he traveled extensively to study with important scholars. He then entered the service of the Isma‘ili ruler of Quhistan, and later worked in Alamut, the Isma‘ili center of power in Iran, where he was active in political life, as well as in teaching and writing. When Alamut fell to Mongol forces in 1256, al-Tusi entered the service of Hulagu and his twelver-imam Shi‘i Ilkhan successors as court astrologer as well as director of awqaf (foundations endowed for pious purposes). It was Hulagu who enlisted al-Tusi to oversee construction one of the largest observatories of the Islamic world outside the city of Maragha in what is now Azerbaijan.

Al-Tusi not only oversaw the planning and construction of the physical structure and its instruments, he also collected a large library and recruited scholars from a variety of backgrounds and geographical origins (a few even from China) to staff the observatory. It thus became an important center of research, teaching, and scholarship. The observatory survived the death of Hulagu (1265) and the death of al-Tusi himself, continuing to function under the direction of his sons, Sadr al-Din and Asil al-Din, for at least another thirty years. Such longevity in a medieval observatory is unusual; it may reflect an assignment of resources from the awqaf to its support.

Al-Tusi is best known to historians of science for his work in mathematical astronomy and cosmography. From an early period, astronomers in the Islamic world had been fascinated by the predictive accuracy and mathematical sophistication of *Ptolemy’s Almagest, although they were deeply troubled by its physically problematic equant theory. It was here that al-Tusi made perhaps his most original contribution. His Tusi couple, as it has come to be called, combined two circular motions: a larger circle rotating uniformly on its axis and a smaller circle, with diameter equal to the radius of the larger circle and internally tangent to it, rotates in the opposite sense with twice the angular velocity of the larger. Al-Tusi showed that a point on the circumference of the smaller circle oscillates along a rectilinear path coinciding with a diameter of the larger circle. This result served as the key to allow al-Tusi to retain most of the mathematical features of the Ptolemaic system while preserving the uniform circular motions which the equant had seemed to violate. The success of al-Tusi stimulated others in his entourage to explore further non-Ptolemaic developments. This Maragha school of astronomy/cosmography has been extensively studied for several decades.

Neither the Tadhkira, al-Tusi’s most complete description of his vision of the universe, nor the treatises of his colleagues and students who carried his studies further, were translated into European languages until the modern period. Even al-Tusi’s Zij al-Ilkhani (*planetary tables), which did not incorporate either new observations or the non-traditional planetary theories, was known to the medieval world only as the Persian Syntaxis of Gregory Chioronides, whose connection to al-Tusi was not recognized. John Greaves, in his Astronomica quaedam (1650), believed that he was making his contemporaries aware for the first time of the value of precession recorded in al-Tusi’s Zij.

Impact on Sixteenth-Century Science

Although al-Tusi’s work was essentially unknown in European languages, Copernicus, in his De revolution-ibus, used the geometry of the Tusi Couple when developing his lunar theory, prompting continuing speculation about possible lines of influence. The existence of Arabic manuscripts containing non-Ptolemaic discussions can be documented in Italy at the beginning of the sixteenth century, during the time that Copernicus was himself in Italy (1496–1503), ostensibly to study medicine. Attempts to argue from the fact of geographical contiguity to intellectual piracy have often foundered on lack of evidence that Copernicus had any familiarity with Arabic language. Recent documentary study shows that a Greek manuscript of the Persian Syntaxis (vat. Gr. 211), which contained notes on al-Tusi’s lunar theory together with clear diagrams of a Tusi couple, was present in Rome by 1475. Further, even though Copernicus may have been ignorant of Arabic, some of his European contemporaries were already becoming interested in the Arabic astronomical tradition and were beginning to collect manuscripts. They studied their contents and sometimes annotated the manuscripts in Latin. Vat. arabo 312 is a copy of al-Tusi’s Tadhkira, annotated in Latin, apparently about the time Copernicus was in Rome. Although the evidence is still largely circumstantial, claims of intellectual borrowing by Copernicus cannot be easily dismissed.

If this theory of planetary motion were his only contribution, al-Tusi would deserve an honored place in history. He did much more, penning a series of tahrir (redactions) of classic Greek mathematical works for students or novices. These works intended to present the author’s essential ideas, simplifying and streamlining the language, while remaining close to the original presentation and avoiding unnecessary repetition. He often added notes to ease the student’s entry into the study. The most popular was his Tahrir of *Euclid’s Elements. Well over a hundred manuscript copies still exist, many heavily annotated by readers. The treatise was translated into Persian twice, as well as into Sanskrit during the late medieval period. Its long popularity is attested by the existence of several printings during the nineteenth century. Despite its long popularity in the East, it remains almost completely unknown among Western historians, eclipsed by an anonymous Tahrir, incorrectly attributed to al-Tusi, printed in 1594 by the Medicean press in Rome. The two share important technical *vocabulary and so may have a genetic connection.

Al-Tusi’s Tahrir provides useful information on structural differences between Arabic transmissions attributed to al-Hajjaj and to Ishaq (in the revision of *Thabit ibn Qurra). Generally, al-Tusi follows the Ishaq–Thabit formulation (including vocabulary and terminology) of Group A manuscripts, while noting differences in numbering or ordering with the version of al-Hajjaj. His Tahrir contains some two hundred commentary notes, typically introduced by the phrase “I say.” Nearly half of these notes present alternative demonstrations, most of which can be traced to the Kitab Hall Shukuk Uqlidis of *Ibn al-Haytham. These commentary notes also include added cases for a number of propositions in books I–IV. These cases are typical of the transmission associated with al-Hajjaj. The printed Pseudo-Tusi Tahrir, while it also contains some notes on structural differences, does not include many commentary notes. On the other hand, it makes constant reference to previous propositions and contains many more lemmas and corollaries.

Although scarcely known in the medieval Latin West, al-Tusi’s work in mathematical astronomy was the foundation of an important research tradition and his student-oriented treatises or their derivatives came to have an important place in madrasa instruction in the eastern half of the Islamic world until supplanted during the colonial period by the introduction of European learning. The commentary on Book I of his Tahrir of the Elements composed by Mohammed Barkat (fl. 1750), for example, became part of the required curriculum in the Dars-i-Nizami curriculum reform in late-eighteenth-century Indian madrasas and was printed several times before the end of the nineteenth century.

Bibliography

Cassinet, R. L’aventure de l’édition des Éléments d’Euclide en arabe par la Société Typographique Médicis vers 1594. Revue française d’histoire du livre (1993) 88–89: 5–51.

De Young, G. “The Astronomica quaedam of John Greaves: Oriental Interests and the Pursuit of Conservatism. In Cosmology Through Time. Edited by S. Colafrancesco and G. Giobbi. Milan: MIMESIS, 2003, pp. 167–173.

———. The Tahrir of Euclid’s Elements by Nasir al-Din al-Tusi. Farhang: Quarterly Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies (2003) 15–16: 117–143.

Mercier, R. The Greek “Persian Syntaxis” and the Zij-i Ilkhani. Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences (1984) 34: 35–60.

[Pseudo-] Tusi. Kitab Tahrir Usul li-Uqlidis. Rome: Typographia Medicea, 1594. Republished under the title Tahrir al-Usul li-Uqlidis: An Anonymous Commentary Upon Euclid’s Elements, wrongly ascribed to Nasiraddin at-Tusi. Frankfurt: IGAIW, 1997.

Ragep, J. Nasir al-Din al-Tusi’s Memoire on Astronomy (Al-tadhkira fi ‘ilm al-hay’a). Two volumes. New York: Springer, 1993.

Rahman, A., et al. Science and Technology in Medieval India—A Bibliography of Source Materials in Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian. New Delhi: Indian National Science Academy, 1982.

Siddiqi, B. H. “Nasir al-Din al-Tusi.” In A History of Muslim Philosophy. Edited by M. M. Sharif. Weisbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1963, I, 564–580.

Saliba, G. The Role of the Almagest Commentaries in Medieval Arabic Astronomy: A Preliminary Survey of Tusi’s Redaction of Ptolemy’s Almagest. Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences (1987) 37: 3–20.

———. The Astronomical Tradition of Maragha: A Historical Survey and Prospects for Future Research. Arabic Sciences and Philosophy (1991) 1: 67–99.

———. “Arabic Planetary Theories and Their Impact on Copernican Astronomy.” In Cosmology Through Time. Edited by S. Colafracesco and G. Giobbi. Milan: MIMESIS, 2003, pp.153–160.

Tusi, Nasir al-Din Muhammad. Contemplation and Action. New York: I.B. Tauris, 1995

GREGG DE YOUNG

T

Tacuinum Sanitatis

Bibliography

Technological Diffusion

Westward Movement

Harnessing

Chess

Paper and Sugar Manufacture

Indian Agriculture

West-to-East Diffusion

Bibliography

Thabit Ibn Qurra

Bibliography

Theodoric of Freiberg

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Secondary Sources

Theorica Planetarum

Medieval Theoricae

Theoricae in the Renaissance

Bibliography

Thierry of Chartres

Bibliography

Thomas of Cantimpré

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Secondary Sources

Toledo

Arabic into Latin in Toledo

The Letter of Toledo

Alfonso X the Wise

Toledo: Capital of Black Magic

How Toledo Got its Reputation

Bibliography

Torrigiano De’ Torrigiani

Bibliography

Primary Source

Secondary Sources

Translation Movements

Greek into Arabic

Arabic into Latin

Arabic into Castilian

Arabic into Hebrew

Arabic into Chinese

Conclusion

Bibliography

Translation Norms and Practice

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Secondary Sources

Transportation

Bibliography

Travel and Exploration

Bibliography

Trotula

Bibliography

Tusi, Nasir Al-Din Al-

Impact on Sixteenth-Century Science

Bibliography