Success and Suppression

Dag Nikolaus Hasse

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780674973695
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Europäische Geschichte der Renaissance

The Renaissance marked a turning point in Europe's relationship to Arabic thought. On the one hand, Dag Nikolaus Hasse argues, it was the period in which important Arabic traditions reached the peak of their influence in Europe. On the other hand, it is the time when the West began to forget, and even actively suppress, its debt to Arabic culture. Success and Suppression traces the complex story of Arabic influence on Renaissance thought.It is often assumed that the Renaissance had little interest in Arabic sciences and philosophy, because humanist polemics from the period attacked Arabic learning and championed Greek civilization. Yet Hasse shows that Renaissance denials of Arabic influence emerged not because scholars of the time rejected that intellectual tradition altogether but because a small group of anti-Arab hard-liners strove to suppress its powerful and persuasive influence. The period witnessed a boom in new translations and multivolume editions of Arabic authors, and European philosophers and scientists incorporated—and often celebrated—Arabic thought in their work, especially in medicine, philosophy, and astrology. But the famous Arabic authorities were a prominent obstacle to the Renaissance project of renewing European academic culture through Greece and Rome, and radical reformers accused Arabic science of linguistic corruption, plagiarism, or irreligion. Hasse shows how a mixture of ideological and scientific motives led to the decline of some Arabic traditions in important areas of European culture, while others continued to flourish.

PART I

The Presence of Arabic Traditions

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Editions and Curricula

The Renaissance discussions of Arabic scientific traditions are best understood if viewed against the background of the Arabic influence in the Middle Ages. This influence manifests itself in the many texts translated, read, and quoted by scholastic writers. Texts of Arabic origin were a very tangible reality on European bookshelves, as I will illustrate in an example. In the years 1410 to 1412, the German magister and physician Amplonius Ratinck composed a well-known catalog of his private library, which contained 636 volumes of manuscripts. Since this catalog has survived until today, it is possible to unbind these volumes in the mind’s eye and regroup the folios again according to their parentage.¹ We thus obtain circa 40 volumes of Greek, 35 volumes of Pagan-Roman, and 42 volumes of Arabic origin. The rest, about 519 volumes, come from Christian-Latin authors.² Amplonius, admittedly, had a distinct affinity for medical literature, which is a genre particularly influenced by Arabic culture. But nevertheless, his bookshelves are typical for the milieu of late medieval scholars. They demonstrate that on the eve of the Renaissance, Arabic culture was a source culture of equal rank with the Greek and the Roman. This is the situation that aroused the protest of humanist scholars.

The presence of Arabic authors on European bookshelves is the consequence of two major translation movements of the Middle Ages: from Greek into Arabic in Baghdad and in other centers of Islamic society from the eighth to the tenth century, and from Arabic into Latin in Spain and Italy, from the late tenth to the early fourteenth century. The Graeco-Arabic translation movement was supported by the financial and political elite of the ʿAbbāsid empire in Baghdad. It covered all those disciplines of Greek learning that were current in the Syriac-speaking Christian communities under Muslim rule in the Fertile Crescent; it transported many volumes of Aristotle’s philosophy, Galen’s medicine, Ptolemy’s astronomy and astrology, and Euclid’s geometry—to mention only the more famous names. Some works, astrological ones in particular, were also translated from middle Persian (Pahlavi).³ This translation movement was the beginning of the impressive development of Arabic scientific and philosophical thought, which, beginning as an elitist form of learning, was gradually adopted into Islamic society and from the twelfth century onward also began to influence the teaching in the Madrasa.⁴

The European translations from Arabic began in late tenth-century Catalonia, where an anonymous scholar rendered several texts on the astrolabe, the astronomical instrument, from Arabic into Latin. In the eleventh century, southern Italy became a center of translation, both from Arabic and from Greek, mostly of texts on medicine and natural philosophy. Best known among these translators is Constantine the African, who died before 1198/1199 as a monk of the Benedictine cloister of Montecassino. He was not the first Arabic–Latin translator in Italy, however; others had already started to translate from Arabic before Constantine arrived from North Africa. The peak of Arabic–Latin translation activity came in twelfth-century Spain, where after the Christian conquest of Muslim cities, such as Toledo in 1085 and Saragossa in 1118, many Arabic manuscripts became accessible to the Latin-speaking world. From about 1120 onward, John of Seville translated more than a dozen astrological and astronomical texts, and other translators followed, focusing on the sciences of the stars, mathematics, religion, and the occult sciences. Philosophical texts followed only later in the century. The city of Toledo, and more specifically, the chapter of Toledo cathedral, became the center of the Arabic–Latin translation movement in the second half of the twelfth century. The famous translators Dominicus Gundisalvi and Gerard of Cremona were both canons of the cathedral. The Toledo translation movement was supported by the archbishop, probably also to promote the languishing Latin culture in Christian Spain, where Arabic and Romance languages dominated.⁵ While Dominicus Gundisalvi is important as the principal translator of the philosophical works of Avicenna, Gerard of Cremona is by far the most productive medieval translator from Arabic, with an enormous number of more than seventy translations attributed to him, among them works that were to become central for European science, such as the Neoplatonic Liber de causis, Avicenna’s Canon medicinae, and Ptolemy’s Almagest. In the Renaissance, Gundisalvi is hardly ever mentioned, but Gerard’s fame continued as “a learned and experienced man of medicine” and “most educated in all sciences and languages” (in omni scientia et lingua doctissimus), as Symphorien Champier described him. For the Renaissance, Gerard of Cremona’s fame rested on the translation of Avicenna’s Canon medicinae.⁶

In the thirteenth century, the translation activity continued in Spain, also fostered by the scientific interests of King Alfonso the Wise of Castile, but the new translating center became southern Italy and Sicily. Frederick II Hohenstaufen attracted many scholars from different Christian, Jewish, and Muslim cultures to his court, among them several translators, and, most notably, Michael Scot from Toledo, who would become his court astrologer and the productive translator of seven (probably even eight) works by Averroes, the commentator on Aristotle.⁷ In several Renaissance sources, Frederick II is remembered as a patron of translations. The polyglot and educated ruler is credited with ordering the Arabic–Latin translation of Ptolemy’s Almagest (this is not correct—the Almagest was translated by Gerard of Cremona in twelfth-century Toledo) and with resuscitating the science of the stars by way of translations from the Arabic.⁸ With the end of the thirteenth century, after a series of medical translations produced in Montpellier and Barcelona, the medieval Arabic–Latin translation movement came to a close. The influence of Arabic sciences and philosophy was of utmost importance for the development of scientific disciplines in Europe, but in varying degrees: in philosophy, the influence was strongest in natural philosophy, psychology, and metaphysics, and weaker in ethics and logic; in the sciences, there was a strong impact on medicine, astrology, astronomy, trigonometry, algebra, zoology, and the occult sciences, but less influence on other sciences, such as geometry and botany.

This was the medieval background of the Renaissance reception of Arabic sciences and philosophy. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it was well-known that in the Middle Ages many Arabic works had been translated into Latin—a kind of Latin that was doubly problematic in stylistic terms from a humanist point of view, since it was both scholastic and Arabicized. Renaissance descriptions of the medieval translation movement can differ markedly. They testify to the fact that there was a controversy about the value of Arabic science. In a dedicatory epistle to an edition of Averroes’s medical work of 1537, the French physician Jean Bruyerin Champier explains to his readers the routes of cultural transmission, saying that after the demise of the school of Athens and the downfall of the Roman imperium, many Greek volumes of philosophy and medicine were translated into Arabic. Bruyerin praises the Arab people for being most learned in the sciences (bonarum scientiarum studiosissima) and continues:

When Alfonso reigned in Spain, a man with greatest desire for the sciences, especially mathematics, at the time when the Moorish still held Betica (i.e., the southern province of Spain), it easily happened that, partly because of the vicinity, partly because of the frequent commerce between the people, books written in the language of Averroes and the other Moorish were transported into the north-eastern province of Spain, where they were somehow rendered into Latin by some Spaniard or, since the schools of philosophy and medicine were already flourishing in Paris, were brought to Paris, after having been transported from Spain to France.⁹

It is obvious that Bruyerin confuses some facts, since the great translation movement in Spain was in the twelfth, not the thirteenth century when Alfonso the Wise reigned, and most of Averroes’s works were translated not in Spain, but in thirteenth-century Italy. But Bruyerin’s knowledge of the historical circumstances is impressive enough. In particular, he is aware of the principal transmission routes from Athens to Muslim Spain to Christian Spain to Paris. For Bruyerin, the story ends in France. A translation story with German coloring is told by Jacob Milich, a professor of medicine at Wittenberg University in 1550:

Even though, after the expulsion of the Greek language, many ancient authors were expelled too, nevertheless some people, thirsty for knowledge, were looking for sources. For this reason, many writings of Hippocrates, Galen and Ptolemy were translated by the Sarracens into the Arabic language, from which not much later, with the help of emperors Lothar and Frederick II, they were translated into Latin.¹⁰

Here we meet again not only with a compliment for the Arabic culture of learning, but also with Frederick II as promoter of the translation movement, a fame he now shares, fantastically, with emperor Lothar III (d. 1137)—probably...