It was thus that the influence exercised by the Arabs manifested itself in every branch of modern civilisation. From the ninth to the fifteenth century the most voluminous literature extant was formed, productions were multiplied; valuable inventions attested the wonderful activity of men’s minds at this epoch; and their influence, felt throughout Christian Europe, justified the opinion that the Arabs have led us in all things. On the one hand we find inestimable material for a history of the Middle Ages—narratives of voyages, the happy idea of the biographical dictionary; on the other, unequalled industry, buildings grandiose in thought and execution, important discoveries in the arts. Does not all this reveal the work of a people too long disdained?g
INFLUENCE OF THE ARABS ON EUROPEAN CIVILISATION
“The nations of Europe,” says Bailly in one of his letters to Voltaire, “after having grown old in barbarism, were only enlightened by the invasion of the Moors and the arrival of the Greeks.” We venture to add—and far more by the invasion of the Moors, or of those to whom Bailly gives the name, than by the arrival of the Greeks of the Lower Empire. And, indeed, one of the distinctive and prominent characteristics of the influence which the Arabs exercised on all branches of modern civilisation, is precisely that of having restored to Europe a knowledge of the ancient Greek authors, whose language, works, and even names, were completely forgotten.
It may be boldly asserted that the numerous translations and still more numerous commentaries which the Arabs wrote on all the works of Ancient Greece, and which makes their literature the second daughter of Greek literature, served to give the modern peoples their first notions of the sciences and letters of antiquity. It was only after having known them through the versions of the Arabs that the desire to possess and understand the original writers took shape, and that the language of Homer and Plato found several diligent interpreters. Indeed, “The greater part of Greek erudition,” according to Hyde,h “which we have to-day from those sources, we received first from the hands of the Arabs.”
In order to justify this assertion, which may seem a little paradoxical, it will be sufficient to call attention to the fact that the Arabs had transmitted to Europe, without disguising its origin, the knowledge they borrowed from the Greeks, long before Boccaccio’s guest, Leontius Pilatus, had started a course on the Greek language at Florence (about 1360), and the dispersal of the inhabitants of Constantinople, after the taking of that town by Muhammed II (1453), had rendered their idiom a common study in Europe. Indeed many Greek books, and notably those which treated of the sciences, were originally translated from Arab into Latin. Among others may be cited the earliest versions of Euclid and Ptolemy.
A not less certain proof that Greek letters first received an asylum from the Arabs, is that several works of Ancient Greece have been preserved by them, and discovered in their own works. Mathematicians, for instance, would never have possessed the Sphericals of the geometrician Menelaus of Alexandria, who was antecedent to Ptolemy, but for the Arab translation (Kitab al-Okar), which was afterwards translated into Latin, nor the eight books of Apollonius of Perga’s Conic Sections, if the Maronite, Abraham Ecchellensis, had not copied and translated (1661) the missing fifth and sixth and seventh books from an Arab manuscript in the Medici library in Florence; neither would the doctors have been able to complete Galen’s Commentaries on Hippocrates’ Epidemics without the Arab translation discovered in the Escurial, and the naturalists would not even possess an abridgement of Aristotle’s Treatise on Stones but for the Arab manuscript in our (the French) National library.
If we trace the whole history of human knowledge, and recall the fact that Greece survived Rome in Alexandria, we may well assign the Arabs the position of guardians to that sacred depôt between Greece and the Renaissance. “They merit,” says M. Libri,i “eternal gratitude for having been the preservers of the learning of the Greeks and Hindus, when those people were no longer producing anything and Europe was still too ignorant to undertake the charge of the precious deposit. Efface the Arabs from history and the Renaissance of letters will be retarded in Europe by several centuries.”
Bronze Cannon and Mounting
In the matter of science especially, and far more than their forerunners the Romans, the Arabs were the heirs of the Greeks. If they far preferred Aristotle’s philosophy to that of Plato, it may have been because they saw in Plato what he actually was, namely one of the fathers of the Christian church, but it was certainly because Aristotle mingled the positive sciences with metaphysical speculation. Nevertheless Plato (Aflathoun), as well as Aristotle (Aristhathlis or Aristou), received from them the surname of Al-Elahi, or the Divine. It was not only on the masters, principes Scriptores, on Aristotle, Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Euclid, Ptolemy, Strabo, that their studies were directed and concentrated; there is no grammarian so mediocre, no rhetorician so poor, no sophist so subtle, that the Arabs have not translated and commented on him.
SCHOLASTICISM
It was in passing through their hands that the peripatetic doctrine engendered scholasticism. It is certain that, in the interminable wrangle between Realists and Nominalists the former leaned on the authority of Avicenna, the others on that of Averrhoës; it is certain, according to the observation of M. Hauréau,j that the philosopher Al-Kendi is often quoted by Alexander of Hales, Henry of Ghent and St. Bonaventura, whilst Al-Farabi furnished his aphorisms to William d’Auvergne, Vincent de Beauvais, and Albertus Magnus; and that this same William d’Auvergne prefers the Arabs far above the Greeks, finding the Greeks too much of philosophers and the Arabs more of theologians. Doubtless scholasticism was a vain and regrettable learning, for the schools of the Middle Ages, as Condillac says, resembled the knights’ tournaments, but, all the same, it produced some free thinkers, such as Johannes Scotus Erigena, Berengarius, Abélard, and William of Occam; and it was from it that, in after time, proceeded John Huss, Savonarola, Luther, Bruno, and Campanella.
After having laid hands on the various branches of the knowledge possessed by the ancient Greeks, who had remained superior to the Latins, in the sciences even more than in letters and not less than in the arts, and after having enlarged its domain in all directions, the Arabs laid it open to the nations of Europe, all of whom they had outdistanced. Spain was naturally the first to receive and spread their gifts. In the tenth century, in the most profound darkness of the Middle Ages, that country “to which,” says Haller,o “the humanities fled together,” was the only one which accepted and welcomed those solid studies, which were everywhere else repelled and destroyed, even in Constantinople, since the time of Leo the Isaurian (717). Indeed, as early as the tenth century, when the Muzarab, John of Seville, translated the Holy Scriptures into Arabic, and when another Muzarab, Alvaro of Cordova, reproached his compatriots with forgetting their language and their law (legem suam nesciunt christiani et linguam propriam non advertunt Latini), in order to train themselves in the Arab doctrine (Arabico eloquio sublimati), Spain counted several illustrious scholars, Ayton, bishop of Vich, a Lupit of Barcelona, and a Joseph, who instructed Adalbero, archbishop of Rheims, all versed in mathematics and astronomy.