MATHEMATICAL SCIENCE
To Spain then came the small number of foreigners who were tormented by the desire to know. Gerbert (born in Auvergne about 930, elected pope in 999, under the name of Silvester II, died in 1003), so celebrated for his adventures, his learning, and his labours, after going through all the schools of France, Italy, and Germany without being able to satisfy the passion for instruction which possessed him, came finally to Spain to seek that physical and mathematical knowledge which raised such admiration in France, Germany, and Italy, whither he returned to spread them, that the prodigies of his learning could only be explained by the accusation of having delivered himself over to the devil.
Gerbert is unanimously credited with having been the first to introduce the use of Arabic figures into these countries, and with having added some elementary notions of algebra to the calculations of arithmetic. He also passes as the first constructor of clocks. Whether, as most of his biographers affirm, Gerbert pursued his studies as far as the homes of the Arabs in Cordova and Seville, or whether he only made a long sojourn in Catalonia and associated with the scholars of that country, as is witnessed to by his collection of Epistles, addressed in great part to Catalans like Borrell, count of Barcelona, Ayton, Joseph, and Lupit, it is none the less certain that Gerbert learned all he knew from the Arabs, and that that knowledge, so prodigious as to appear supernatural, was, as William of Malmesbury says, “stolen from the Saracens.”
His example and his success roused other foreigners to come and glean, where he had made so ample a harvest. The German Hermannus-Contractus (who died in 1054), author of the book, De Compositione Astrolabii; the English Adelard, who translated the first Arabic Euclid into Latin (about 1130); the Italian Campano of Novara, who published a Theory of the Planets; Daniel Morley; Otto of Freising; with Hermann the German; Plato of Tivoli; Gerard of Cremona, who translated at Toledo itself, Alhazen; Avicenna, Rhazes, Albucasis, and even Ptolemy’s Almagest, not from the Greek, but from the Arabic—that Gerard of Cremona of whom it was said: “At Toledo he lived, Toledo he raised to the stars”—all went in succession to gather in Spain the elements of mathematics, physics, and astronomy, which they carried thence to their compatriots.
Montuclak not only says that “the Arabs were long the sole depositaries of learning, and that it is to their commerce that we owe the first rays of light which came to chase away the darkness of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries”; he adds that “during this period, all who obtained the greatest reputation in mathematics had been to acquire their knowledge amongst the Arabs.” It is asserted that all the authors who wrote on the exact sciences before the fifteenth century did nothing but copy the Arabs, or, at the most, enlarge upon their lessons. Such were the Italian Leonardo da Pisa, the Polish Vitellio, the Spaniard Raymond Lully, the English Roger Bacon, and finally the French Arnauld de Villeneuve, who is credited with having discovered spirits of wine, oil of turpentine, and other chemical preparations.
During the same period, the whole of European geography was limited to the Seven Climates of Edrisi, and, in the seventeenth century, when correcting by Abu Ishak Ibrahim ben Yahya certain geographical errors, Abraham Hinckelmann was able to say: “The greatest assistance and illumination for posterity we owe to Arabism.” As to the famous Astronomical Tables of Alfonso X, they, like his book on Armillaries or celebrated spheres, only sum up the discoveries of the Arabs previous to the thirteenth century. It was from their works that all his learning was drawn by that celebrated monarch, who received the surname of the Wise (or learned), and who did indeed effect some advancement in science, between the system of Ptolemy and that of Copernicus. The Alphonsine Tables are borrowed from the various Ziji or tables of the Arab astronomers, and reproduce their form and substance.
When Louis XIV had a degree of the meridian measured geometrically, in order to determine the size of the earth, he doubtless did not know that five centuries before, the caliph Al-Mamun had ordered the same operation to be performed by his astronomers at Baghdad. In the Middle Ages, according to Bailly,l “the first step taken towards the revival of learning was the translation of Alfergan’s Elements of Astronomy.” That famous Spanish rabbi, Aben-hezra (or Esdra), who was surnamed the Great, the Wise, the Admirable, on account of his book on The Sphere, was born at Toledo, in 1119, and had been a disciple of the Arabs in astronomy. He spread his masters’ lessons throughout Europe. It was from Albategnius, more than from Ptolemy, that Sacrobosco (John of Holywood) had drawn the materials for his book De Sphera Mundi; it was in Albategnius, too, that the commentator on that great astronomer, Regiomontanus (Johann Müller, of Königsberg, Regius Mons), had found the first notion of tangents. It was from Alhazen’s Twilight that the illustrious Kepler took his ideas of atmospheric refraction; and it may be that Newton himself owes to the Arabs, rather than to the apple in his orchard at Woolsthorpe, the first apperception of the system of the universe; for Muhammed ben Musa (quoted in the Bibliot. arab. Philosophorum) seems, when writing his books on The Movement of the Celestial Bodies and on The Force of Attraction, to have had an inkling of the great law of general harmony.
MEDICINE
The influence of the Arabs on all the natural sciences, chemical or medical, is not less incontestable than their influence on the mathematical sciences. Roger Bacon and Raymond Lully were as much their pupils in the attempted science of alchemy, the “grand art,” as in the actual science of numerical calculations. It was by them also that Albertus Magnus (Albrecht Grotus or Gross, born in Swabia in 1193), that universal scholar, the eminent master of St. Thomas Aquinas, whom, like Gerbert, men called “the magician,” was initiated into all the learning of the Aristotelian school. And even after the year 1600, Fabricius Acquapendente could say, “Celsus amongst the Latins, Paulus Ægineta amongst the Greeks, and Albucasis amongst the Arabs, form a triumvirate to whom I confess that I am under the greatest obligations.”
Even as the astronomer Albategnius in the domain of heaven, or the geographer Edrisi in that of the earth, so Avicenna and Averrhoës reigned supreme over medicine, during six hundred years, down to the sixteenth century. At Montpellier and Louvain, commentaries on Avicenna were still being made in the last century. Both Boerhaave and Haller concede this long predominance to Arab medicine, and Brucker could say with perfect truth: “Until the renascence of literature, not only among the Arabs, but also indeed among the Christians, Avicenna rules all but alone.” When, in the very beginning of the thirteenth century, the Portuguese doctor Pedro Juan, who was archbishop of Braga and then pope under the title of John XXI, wrote his Treasury of the Poor, or Remedies for all Maladies, his Treatise on Hygiene, and his Treatise on the Formation of Man, he was copying the Arabs.