Among the hospitals of Bagdad was a palatial structure with many rooms and wards, which were furnished in elaborate style. Here the patients were gratuitously provided with food and medicine and regularly visited by the physicians of the city. It was here that Rhazes, the most celebrated Mussulman physician of his time, gave his lectures and founded the great medical school which drew students from all parts of Western Asia. Rhazes is famous not only for his eminence as a physician but also as a voluminous writer on medicine and for having described smallpox nearly nine hundred years before Jenner began his noted investigations on this dread disease.
It was, however, the colleges, of which there were more than thirty—“each more magnificent than a palace”—that gave Bagdad its greatest fame in the mediæval world. One of these, called the Nizamiyah, founded by an eminent vizier who was the friend of the poet Omar Khayyám, was, on account of its architectural splendor, and the celebrity of its professional staff, known as the “Mother of the colleges of Bagdad.” Among its most illustrious lecturers were Ghazzali, celebrated as a philosopher and a theologian, and Bohadin, who achieved eminence as a historian, as a statesman, and as the biographer of the Sultan Saladin. The endowment of the Nizamiyah was so princely that it sufficed not only to pay the salaries of the professors but also to pay for the board and tuition of indigent students.
Completely eclipsing the Nizamiyah College in its architectural grandeur, sumptuous equipment, and wealth of endowment was the College of the Mustansiriyah—the ruins of which still exist—which was founded by the Caliph Mustansir, the father of Mustasim, who was put to death by Hulago after the destruction of Bagdad. So great was the splendor of this college that it is said to have surpassed any similar institution in Islam. It was not only the most notable seat of learning in Bagdad, but was also its most beautiful and imposing edifice. When one recalls the many gorgeous palaces of the city—many of them costing fabulous sums—one can realize what munificent patrons were Bagdad’s Caliph and men of wealth and how well this fairy capital deserved its reputation as the Orient’s most famous center of science and letters. It had only one rival and that was the famous Ommaied metropolis in Spain, so celebrated for its riches and attractions, its schools and libraries and scholars—a city which Hroswitha, the gifted nun of Gandersheim, has so beautifully described in a single distich:
Corduba famosa, locuples de nomine dicta,
Inclyta deliciis, rebus quoque splendida cunctis.
But no description of Bagdad is complete without some account of its more eminent Caliphs, especially of its immortal Harun-Al-Rashid, who is “inseparably associated with the most charming collection of stories ever invented for the solace and delight of mankind.” This brilliant Saracen ruler has long been ranked among the illustrious men of all time. For, notwithstanding the fact that from time immemorial legends have gathered around his name in greater number than about those of King Arthur, or Charlemagne, or Frederick Barbarossa, authentic history tells us enough of his character and achievements to make the romantic life of “Aaron the Just”—to Anglicize his name—one of supreme fascination and abiding interest.
The Arabians [Sismondi writes] are indebted to him for the rapid progress which they made in science and literature, for Harun never built a mosque without attaching to it a school. His successors followed his example, and in a short period the sciences which were cultivated in the capital spread themselves to the very extremities of the empire of the Caliphs. Whenever the faithful assembled to adore the Divinity, they found in this temple an opportunity of rendering Him the noblest homage which His creatures can pay—by the cultivation of those faculties with which their Creator has endowed them. Harun-Al-Rashid, besides, was sufficiently superior to the fanaticism which had previously animated his sect not to despise the knowledge which the professors of another faith possessed. The head of his schools and the first director of studies in his empire was a Nestorian Christian of Damascus, of the name of John Ebn Mesua.[436]
Christians were the translators of the works of Plato and Aristotle; of Galen, Hippocrates, and Dioscorides; of Ptolemy, Euclid, and Apollonius Pergæus.
No Caliph ever gathered round him so great a number of learned men:—poets, jurists, grammarians, cadis and scribes,—to say nothing of the wits and musicians who enjoyed his patronage. Personally, too, he had every quality that could recommend him to the literary men of his time. Harun himself was an accomplished scholar and an excellent poet; he was well versed in history, tradition and poetry which he could always quote on appropriate occasions. He possessed exquisite literary taste and unerring discernment and his dignified demeanor made him an object of profound respect to high and low.[437]
He was, indeed, as described by his biographers, “the most accomplished, eloquent and generous of the Caliphs,” and the stories that are told of his lavish generosity towards scholars who frequented his court proved that he was probably the most munificent patron of men of science and letters that ever lived.