This illustrious Bavarian schoolman joined the Dominican Order in his youth, lectured to great audiences in Cologne, became bishop of Ratisbonne in 1260, and died in 1280. Thomas Aquinas the greatest of schoolmen, was among his pupils.
In the Spanish code of laws, begun in 1256, during the reign of Alfonso el Sabio, and known as Las Siete Partidas, we read:
“Just as mariners are guided during the night by the needle, which replaces for them the shores and pole star alike, by showing them the course to pursue both in fair weather and foul, so those who are called upon to advise the King must always be guided by a spirit of justice.”
Brunetto Latini, in his Trésor des Sciences, 1260, writes:
“The sailors navigate the seas guided by the two stars called the tramontanes, and each of the two parts of the lodestone directs the end of the needle to the star to which that part itself turns.”
Brunetto Latini (1230-1294) was a man of great eminence in the thirteenth century; Dante was among his pupils at Florence. For political reasons, he removed to Paris, where he wrote his Trésor and also his Tesoretto. He visited Roger Bacon at Oxford about 1260.
In his treatise De Contemplatione, begun in 1272, Raymond Lully writes:
“As the needle, after having touched the lodestone, turns to the north, so the mariner’s needle (acus nautica) directs them over the sea.”
Lully was born at Palma in the Island of Majorca in 1236; he joined the Third Order of St. Francis, dying in 1315.
Ristoro d’Arezzo, in his Libro della Composizione del Mundo, written in 1282, has the following: