It was from Spain then that all the doctors of Europe came, and that, through them, the taste for science and letters was extended. “The Spanish doctors,” says Haller, “while their people were gradually recovering the country, communicated the love of letters to the Italians.” It was to Spain, at all events, that the Jews, then so renowned for their healing art, went to study, to afterwards scatter, like young doctors leaving the university, through the various countries of Europe. Kings and popes took their doctors from the Jews. To cite only a few famous instances, we call attention to the fact that the physician of Alfonso the Fighter, king of Aragon, Pedro Alfonso, author of some Latin tales, part of which were translated in Francesco Sansovino’s Cento Novelle Antiche, was a converted Jew; and Paul Ricius, physician to the emperor Maximilian I, was a Jew who remained a Jew. The latter had studied in Spain, where he translated the at-Takrif of Albucasis, the book which Haller calls the “common fountain” of modern medicine. We have seen that the Arabs practised a multitude of surgical operations, unknown to the ancients, and in like manner enriched pharmacy by a multitude of new medicaments.
But one fact sums up in itself all the proofs of the influence which the Arabs exerted on the medical art, and that is that the famous school of Salerno, whose laws were once followed throughout Europe, owes its origin to the Arabs. When (about 1000) the Norman, Robert Guiscard, took Salerno from the people called Saracens, who had occupied the south of Italy for more than two centuries, he found a school of medicine established there by these infidels. He had the wisdom to preserve it, enrich it, and to give it Constantine Africanus as chief. This man was a Moor from Carthage, whom travels and adventures flung, like Edrisi, into the power of the Normans of Sicily; who took the cowl at the monastery of Monte Cassino under the celebrated abbot Desiderius, afterwards Pope Victor III; and, in his retreat, translated into Latin all his compatriots’ works on the healing art. He thus ended by founding the school of Salerno, for it was from his works that all the aphorisms of the Medicina Salertina were taken. As the University of Montpellier had for founders (about 1200) the Aragonese, to whom that town, which was then almost modern and had not yet inherited the bishopric of Maguelonne, at that time belonged, it may be asserted, according to the generally received tradition, that its faculty of medicine was founded at least indirectly by the Arabs, and that it was in that sense grounded on their teaching—the sole adopted, the sole reigning one, the most enlightened and scientific of the age.
ARCHITECTURE
As to the influence of Arabs on architecture, the only one of the fine arts which religion permitted Moslems to cultivate, it seems that it cannot be set in doubt that it appears with as much certainty as distinction. The question has often been asked: Whence came it that the architecture of the close of the Middle Ages, that which passed from the round to the pointed arch, and from basilicas to cathedrals, was called Gothic? As this name, if it implied a northern origin, would be in flagrant contradiction with the facts, the question has remained unanswered.
But we must remind ourselves that the name Gothic has not been given only to the architecture which the twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw prevailing. The handwriting and the missal, which in the year 1091 were replaced in Spain by the Latin (then called French) characters, and by the Roman ritual, were also called Gothic. They had received and preserved this name of Gothic because their use dated from the time when Spain was the domain of the Goths. Might it not also be because the first lessons in the new architecture came to Europe through Spain, that this architecture, e.g., like the Spanish handwriting and liturgy, was named Gothic?
This perfectly simple and natural explanation is, moreover, in complete accordance with history. The conjectures of men versed in the matter are agreed on this point—that modern architecture had its birth at Byzantium, that second Rome where the arts took refuge when they were driven out of Italy. The Byzantine architects, who were the first to mingle the capricious and flowery style of the East with the sober and regular style of ancient Greece, had two sorts of pupils—the Arabs and the Germanic peoples. The former first founded the architecture called Moorish or Saracen; and afterwards the latter, that which later on was called Gothic. Starting from the same point the two architectures remain analogous, almost similar, during two centuries, both preserving, with the differences imposed by the climate, the traditions of their common origin. Thus the mosque of Cordova, raised by a prince of Syria, and the old basilicas of Germany are equally sprung from the Byzantine style. Then they separate, to take each a style of its own. The Moslem architecture preserves the system of surbased naves, and takes as its special characteristic the horseshoe arch, that is to say, one narrowing at its base, and having the form of an inverted crescent.
Christian architecture adopts the system of high, pointed naves, and its distinctive characteristic becomes the pointed arch, substituted for the pagan round arch. But it must be noticed that the Arabs had employed the pointed arch before the Christians; that, in Spain especially, a multitude of monuments prove their use of this form which was unknown to antiquity; and that it is doubtless because the pointed arch, now become the striking and characteristic feature of Christian architecture, had passed from Spain into Europe, that the whole system was named Gothic. Finally, these two architectures derived from Byzantium, the Arab and the Germanic, becoming ever more and more assimilated, end by merging, at the close of eight centuries, into the style called Renaissance. No one denies, no one disputes, the striking resemblance which exists between the Arab monuments and those of Europe in the Middle Ages. This resemblance is not only found in the great edifices of the capitals, for the construction of which Saracen architects were sometimes called in, as happened in the case of Notre Dame de Paris itself. It can be traced even in the humblest buildings of the little towns.
“Thus,” says Viardot,m “I have found the multilobar arch of the Mezquita at Cordova in the cloisters of Norwich cathedral, and the delicate colonnette of the Alhambra in the church of Notre Dame at Dijon. This resemblance was, then, not merely casual and fortuitous; it was general and permanent. Nothing further is needed to prove the thesis. If Christian and Arab art resembled each other, and if one preceded the other, it is evident that of the two one was imitated and the other the imitator. Was it the Arab art which imitated the Christian art? No; for the priority of its works is manifest and incontestable; for Europe, in the Middle Ages, received all its knowledge from the Arabs, and must also have received from them the only art whose cultivation the law of religion permitted.”
MUSIC
The impossibility which exists, in spite of the efforts of all modern scholars, of our having an acquaintance, even an imperfect and approximate one, with the music of the Greeks, must teach and give a conception of the great difficulty of procuring proofs of the state of this art, or discovering and understanding monuments of it, once the traditions are interrupted. It is a dead language in which none can now read. In the preceding section we have had to limit ourselves to demonstrating that the Arabs cultivated music as a very important and very advanced art. In the archives of the chapter of Toledo, there exists a precious monument of the influence which they exercised on modern music. This is a manuscript, annotated in the hand of Alfonso the Wise himself, and including the canticles (cantigas) composed by that prince, with the music to which they were sung. In it we find not only the six notes ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, invented, towards 1030, by the monk Guido of Arezzo, but also the seventh note, the five lines, and the keys, whose discovery was subsequent, and even the upward and downward tails of the notes, the use of which was not introduced into the musical writing of the rest of Europe until much later. Up till then music had served only for the psalmodies of the church, for the plain chant of hymns and antiphons. This manuscript, copied and cited in the Paleographia Castellana is, according to all appearance, the most ancient monument of the regular application of music to ordinary and profane poetry.