CHAPTER XXXII
CONSTANTINUS AFRICANUS: C. 1015-1087.
Reputation and influence—His studies in the Orient—His later life in Italy—His works were mainly translations—Pantegni—Viaticum—Other translations—The book of degrees—On melancholy—On disorders of the stomach—Medical works ascribed to Alfanus—Constantinus and experiment—“Experiments” involving incantations—Superstition comparatively rare in Constantinus—And of Greek rather than Arabic origin—Some signs of astrology and alchemy—Constantinus and the School of Salerno—Liber aureus and John Afflacius—Afflacius more superstitious than his master.
Reputation and influence.
Constantinus Africanus will be here considered at perhaps greater length than his connection with the history either of magic or experimental science requires, but which his general importance in the history of medicine and the lack of any good treatment of him in English may justify.[2950] Our discussion of him as an importer of Arabic medicine will also serve to support our attitude towards the School of Salerno. Daremberg wrote in 1853, “We owe a great debt of gratitude to Constantinus because he thus opened for Latin lands the treasures of the east and consequently those of Greece. He has received and he deserves from every point of view the title of restorer of medical literature in the west.”[2951] Daremberg proceeded to propose that a statue of Constantinus be erected in the center of the Gulf of Salerno or on the summit of Monte Cassino. Yet in 1870 he made the surprising assertion that “the voice of Constantinus towards the close of the eleventh century is an isolated voice and almost without an echo.”[2952] But as a matter of fact Constantinus was a much cited authority during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the works both of medicine and of natural science produced in Latin in western Europe, and his translations were cited under his own name rather than those of their original authors.[2953]
His studies in the Orient.
A brief sketch of Constantinus’ career and a list of his works[2954] is twice supplied us by Peter the Deacon, who wrote in the next century,[2955] and who treats of Constantinus both in the chronicle of Monte Cassino, which he continued to the year 1138,[2956] and in his work on the illustrious men of Monte Cassino.[2957] Peter tells that Constantinus was born at Carthage, by which he probably means Tunis, since Carthage was no longer in existence, but went to Babylon, by which Cairo is presumably designated, since Babylon had ages before been reduced to a dust heap,[2958] to improve his education. His birth must have been in about 1015. There he is said to have studied grammar, dialectic, geometry, arithmetic, “mathematics,” astronomy, and physics or medicine (physica). To this curriculum in the Chronicle Peter adds in the Lives of Illustrious Men the subjects of music and necromancy. When so little was said of spirits in the occult science of the Arabic authors of the ninth century whom we considered in an earlier chapter, it is rather a surprise to hear that Constantinus studied necromancy, but that subject is listed along with mathematical and natural sciences by Al-Farabi in his De ortu scientiarum,[2959] and we shall find this classification reproduced by two western Christian scholars of the twelfth century.[2960] The mathematica and astronomy which Constantinus studied very likely also included considerable astrology and divination. At any rate we are told that he not only pursued his studies among “the Chaldeans, Arabs, Persians, and Saracens,” and was fully imbued with “all the arts of the Egyptians,” but even, like Apollonius of Tyana, visited India and Ethiopia in his quest for learning. It was only after a lapse of thirty-nine or forty years that he returned to North Africa. Most modern secondary accounts here state that Constantinus was soon forced to flee from North Africa because of the jealousy of other physicians who accused him of magic,[2961] or from fear that his fellow citizens would kill him as a wizard. In view of his study of necromancy, this may well have been the case. Peter the Deacon, however, simply states that when the Africans saw him so fully instructed in the studies of all nations, they plotted to kill him,[2962] and gives no further indication of their motives.
His later life in Italy.
Constantinus secretly boarded ship and made his escape to Salerno, where he lived for some time in poverty, until a brother of the caliph (regis Babiloniorum) who chanced to come there recognized him, after which he was held in great honor by Duke Robert Guiscard. The secondary accounts say that he became Robert’s confidential secretary and that he had previously occupied a similar position under the Byzantine emperor, Constantine Monomachos,[2963] but of these matters again Peter the Deacon is silent. When Constantinus left the Norman court, it was to become a monk at Monte Cassino, where he remained until his death in 1087. In a work addressed to the archbishop of Salerno he speaks of himself as Constantinus Africanus Cassinensis[2964] and Albertus Magnus cites him as Constantinus Cassianensis.[2965] What purports to be a picture of Constantinus is preserved in a manuscript of the fifteenth century at Oxford.[2966]
His works were mainly translations.
Peter the Deacon states both in the Chronicle and in the Illustrious Men that while at the monastery of Monte Cassino Constantinus Africanus “translated a great number of books from the languages of various peoples.” Peter then lists the chief of these. It is interesting to note, in view of the fact that Constantinus in prefaces and introductions appears to claim some of the works as his own, and that he was accused of fraud and plagiarism by medieval writers who followed him as well as by modern investigators, that Peter the Deacon speaks of all his writings as translations from other languages. Peter does not, however, give us much information as to who the Greek or Arabic authorities were whom Constantine translated. It may be added that if Constantinus claimed for himself the credit for Latin versions which were essentially translations, he was merely continuing a practice of which Arabic authors themselves had been repeatedly guilty. Indeed, we are told that they sometimes even destroyed earlier works which they had copied in order to receive sole credit for ideas which were not their own.[2967]