The letter of Pope Alexander III.
How real Prester John was to the men of the twelfth century may be seen from the fact that Pope Alexander III on September 27, 1177, addressed from the Rialto in Venice a letter to him or to some actual eastern potentate whom he had confused with him.[753] The Pope does not expressly mention Prester John’s letter to Manuel but says that he has heard of him from many persons and common report, and more especially from “Master Philip, our friend and physician,” who had talked “with great and honourable men of your kingdom,” by whom he had been informed of their ruler’s desire for a church and altar at Jerusalem. It is this Philip whom the Pope now sends with his letter to Prester John and to instruct him in the doctrine of the Roman church. But it is a long and laborious journey involving many hardships and vicissitudes and the traversing of many countries with barbarous and unknown languages.
Philip, the papal physician.
Whether Philip ever succeeded in delivering the letter is not known and he has himself been regarded as a mysterious personage of whom nothing further was known.[754] I would suggest, however, that, as he seems to have been conversant with Syria and the Holy Land, he may have been the Philip of whose translation of the Secret of Secrets of the Pseudo-Aristotle we shall treat in the next chapter, a work which he found in Antioch and dedicated to the bishop of Tripoli. Or, if we do not meet this particular Philip again, we shall find in close relations with other popes other physicians whose names are prominent in the natural and occult science of the age.
[722] Berlin 956, 12th century, fols. 24-25.
[723] Gulielmi Alverni ... Opera Omnia, 1591, p. 1003, De universo, II, iii, 23.
[724] Mineral. II, iii, 4.
[725] One condemned at Paris in 1277 began, “The Indians have believed....”; two in a Harleian MS 2404 are called Indeana; a third, part Latin and part French, in Sloane MS 314 of the 15th century, opens, “This is the Indyana of Gremmgus which is called the daughter of astronomy and which one of the sages of India wrote.” See also CU Magdalene 27 (F. 4. 27, Haenel 23), late 14th century, fols. 72-88, “Hec est geomentia Indiana que vocatur filia Ast ... quam fecit unius (sic) sapientum Indie....”
[726] See D. E. Smith and L. C. Karpinski, The Hindu-Arabic Numerals, Boston, 1911; S. R. Benedict, A Comparative Study of the Early Treatises introducing into Europe the Hindu Art of Reckoning, Concord, 1914; L. C. Karpinski, “Two Twelfth Century Algorisms,” Isis, III (1921) 396-413. For “newly discovered evidence showing that the Hindu numerals were known to and justly appreciated by the Syrian writer Severus Sebokht, who lived in the second half of the seventh century,” see F. Nau in Journal asiatique, 1910, and J. Ginsburg, “New Light on our Numerals,” in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, XXIII (1917) 366-9. On the question of the debt of Arabic algebra to India, especially in the case of Muhammad. b. Musa al-Hwarazmi, who was also an astrologer, see J. Ruska Zur ältesten arabischen Algebra und Rechenkunst, in Sitzb. d. Heidelberger Akademie d. Wiss. Philos. hist. Klasse, 1917.
[727] Scritti di Leonardo Pisano, vol. I, 1857.