No date in Michael’s career before the thirteenth century is fixed. If it is true that the three sections of his main work were written under Innocent III, that places them between 1198 and 1216. The date of his translation of the astronomical work of Alpetragius or Alpetrangi (Nûr ed-din el-Betrûgî, Abû Ishâq) seems to have been in the year 1217 on Friday, August 18, in the third hour and at Toledo. [973] Brown holds that Michael translated Avicenna on animals in 1210 for Frederick II and that the emperor kept it to himself until 1232, when he allowed Henry of Cologne to copy it.[974] But the date 1210 perhaps applies only to a glossary of Arabic terms which accompanies the work and which is ascribed to a “Master Al.”[975] In a thirteenth century manuscript at Cambridge Michael Scot’s translation of Aristotle’s History of Animals is accompanied by a note which begins, “And I Michael Scot who translated this book into Latin swear that in the year 1221 on Wednesday, October twenty-first.”[976] The note and date, however, do not refer to the completion of the translation but to a consultation in which a woman showed him two stones like eggs which came from another woman’s womb and of which he gives a painstakingly detailed description. There is, however, something wrong with the date, since in 1221 the twenty-first of October fell on Thursday.[977]
Michael Scot and the papacy.
The career of Michael Scot affords an especially good illustration of how little likelihood there was of anyone’s being persecuted by the medieval church for belief in or practice of astrology. Michael, although subordinating the stars to God and admitting human free will, as we shall see, both believed in the possibility of astrological prediction and made such predictions himself. Yet he was a clergyman, perhaps even a doctor of theology,[978] as well as a court astrologer, and furthermore was a clergyman of sufficient rank and prominence to enable Pope Honorius III to procure in 1224 his election to the archbishopric of Cashel in Ireland.[979] At the same time the papal curia issued a dispensation permitting Michael to hold a plurality, so that he evidently already occupied some desirable benefice. Michael declined the archbishopric of Cashel, on the ground that he was ignorant of the native language but perhaps because he preferred a position in England; for we find the papacy renewing its efforts in his behalf, and Gregory IX on April 28, 1227, again wrote to Stephen Langton, archbishop of Canterbury, urging him to make provision for “master Michael Scot,” whom he characterized as “well instructed not only in Latin but also in the Hebrew and Arabic languages.”[980]
Prominent position in the world of learning.
Whether Michael ever secured the additional foreign benefice or not, he seems to have remained in Italy with Frederick until the end of his days. He also seems to have continued prominent among men of learning, since in 1228 Leonardo of Pisa dedicated to him the revised and enlarged version of his Liber abaci,[981] important in connection with the introduction of the Hindu-Arabic numerals into western Europe.
Relation to the introduction of the new Aristotle.
Roger Bacon in the Opus Maius[982] in a passage often cited by historians of medieval thought ascribes the introduction of the new Aristotle into western Latin Christendom to Michael Scot who, he says, appeared in 1230 A. D. with portions of the works of Aristotle in natural philosophy and metaphysics. Before his time there were only the works on logic and a few others translated by Boethius from the Greek; since 1230 the philosophy of Aristotle “has been magnified among the Latins.” Although many writers have quoted this statement as authoritative in one way or another, it must now be regarded as valuable only as one more illustration of the loose and misleading character of most of Roger’s allusions to past learning and to the work of previous translators. We know that the books of Aristotle on natural philosophy had become so well known by that time that in 1210 the study of them was forbidden at the university of Paris, and that about that same year, according to Rigord’s chronicle of the reign of Philip II, the books of Metaphysics of Aristotle were brought from Constantinople, translated from Greek into Latin, and began to be read at Paris.[983] But Bacon’s date is more than twenty years too late, and we have already mentioned the translation of The Secret of Secrets, which Bacon regarded as genuine, the acquaintance of Alexander Neckam with works of Aristotle, Alfred of England’s translation of the De vegetabilibus and of three additional chapters to the Meteorology, the still earlier translation of the rest of that work by Aristippus from the Greek and by Gerard of Cremona from the Arabic, and Gerard’s numerous other translations of works of Aristotle in natural philosophy. The translations of Gerard and Aristippus take us back to the middle of the twelfth century nearly a century before the date set by Bacon for the introduction of the new Aristotle.[984] Michael Scot, then, did not introduce the works of Aristotle on natural science and Bacon’s chronological recollections are obviously too faulty for us to accept the date 1230 as of any exact significance in even Michael’s own career, to say nothing of the history of the translation of Aristotle.
This is not to say that Michael was not of some importance in that process, since he did translate works of Aristotle and his Arabic commentators, especially Avicenna and Averroes. Frederick II is sometimes said to have ordered the translation from Greek and Arabic of such works of Aristotle and other philosophers as had not yet been translated from Greek or Arabic.[985] But the letter which has been ascribed in this connection to Frederick is really by his son and successor, Manfred,[986] for whom many translations were made, including several Aristotelian treatises, genuine and spurious, by Bartholomew of Messina. Already, however, in 1231 and 1232 a Jew at Naples had translated Averroes’ abridgement of the Almagest and his commentary on the Organon, in the latter extolling Frederick’s munificence and love of science.[987] Michael Scot has been shown to have translated from the Arabic the History of Animals and other works on animals, making nineteen books in all, and also Avicenna’s compendium of the same, the De caelo et mundo, the De anima with the commentary of Averroes, and perhaps the Metaphysics or part of it.[988] His translation of the De caelo et mundo was accompanied by a translation of Alpetrangi’s commentary on the same.[989]
Thirteenth century criticism of Michael Scot.
Scholars of the succeeding generation sometimes spoke unfavorably of Michael’s work. Although Roger Bacon recognized his translations as the central event in the Latin reception of the Aristotelian philosophy, and spoke of him as “a notable inquirer into matter, motion, and the course of the constellations,”[990] he listed him among those translators who “understood neither sciences nor languages, not even Latin,” and charged more than once that a Jew named Andrew was really responsible for the translations credited to Michael.[991] Albertus Magnus asserted that Michael Scot “in reality was ignorant concerning nature and did not understand the books of Aristotle well.”[992] Yet he used Michael’s translation of the Historia Animalium as the basis of his own work on the subject, often following it word for word.[993] Michael was, however, listed or cited as an authority by the thirteenth century encyclopedists, Thomas of Cantimpré, Bartholomew of England, Vincent of Beauvais, and at the close of that century is frequently cited by the physician Arnald of Villanova in his Breviarium practicae.[994]