It has been stated by more than one author that Peter went to Treviso to teach medicine in 1314, but it is doubtful if he even received a definite call from that city, although it had his name under consideration.[2779] His salary at Padua has repeatedly been stated at the high figure of five hundred pounds or lire a month but this amount really represents his annual stipend.[2780] He must, however, have been fairly well-to-do—we have hints that his practice was lucrative—for in 1315 when he made his will he had not been paid any salary for three or four years, and yet had considerable property. Peter was dead before the close of 1318,[2781] but the apparent attribution of his work on poisons to Pope John XXII[2782] makes it seem that he lived beyond August, 1316. One manuscript of that treatise speaks of Peter as acting dean of Montpellier at that time, but this is unlikely.[2783]
Relations with the church.
We have dubious stories and more reliable data to show both that Peter had intimate and friendly relations with popes, whom he seems to have served in a medical capacity and from whom he received patronage and protection, and on the other hand that he was in difficulties with the Inquisition.[2784] Besides the fact that his work on poisons was certainly written for some pope, if not for John XXII, we have the tale that he was physician to Pope Honorius IV (1285-1287) and charged him one hundred florins a day.[2785] On the other hand, we have the assertion of Thomas of Strasburg, Prior-General of the Augustinian Friars from 1345 to 1357 that he was present in Padua when the bones of Peter of Abano were burned for his heretical errors, and the statements of still later writers, which are perhaps after all merely unwarrantable inferences from Thomas’s assertion and from Peter’s own words in his will and the Conciliator, that Peter died while under trial a second time by the Inquisition, which had once before instituted proceedings against him unsuccessfully. But these matters require a longer discussion than seems advisable now and so will be treated of more fully in Appendix VIII to this chapter.
Great reputation.
The promptness with which Peter’s works appeared in book form after the invention of printing and the number of times that the Conciliator and some others were reprinted attest his long continued reputation and popularity as a medical authority and man of broad general learning. Regiomontanus, the renowned mathematician of the fifteenth century, when lecturing on Alfraganus at Padua, delivered a public panegyric upon Peter of Abano.[2786] It was perhaps to be expected that Michael Savonarola, grandfather of the famous friar who tried to reform Florence and himself a physician and medical writer of some note, should belaud Peter in his work on the great citizens of Padua in the past, which he wrote about 1445; and that these eulogies should be repeated in such books as Scardeone’s On the Antiquity of the City of Padua, Naudé’s Apology for Great Men who have been falsely suspected of Magic, Tomasini’s Eulogies of Illustrious Men adorned with pictures, and Duchastel’s Lives of Illustrious Physicians. But Peter’s reputation at the close of the middle ages is also attested in a criticism of some of his views by Symphorien Champier which was written in 1514 and is found appended to the 1526 edition of the Conciliator. Champier’s object is to correct Abano’s errors, that is to say, those passages in the Conciliator where he regards Peter’s views as bordering too closely upon magic or of too extreme an astrological character for a Christian. But he admits Peter’s great medical reputation, stating that the most learned physicians praise the medical and philosophical views of the Conciliator and that Peter is believed to have surpassed all other Christian physicians in his study of medicine and advancement of truth. But, as Horace says, even Homer nods; hence Champier will correct Peter in a few points in order to enable lovers of Peter’s doctrines to get the benefit of them without falling into his occasional errors.
Not a miracle in a rude age.
The writers of the Renaissance and of early modern times became so enthusiastic over Peter of Abano, and at the same time so failed to appreciate the character and accomplishments of medieval learning in general, that they were wont to depict him as a miracle of learning in a rude age—just as more recent scholars have over-estimated Roger Bacon’s superiority to his time—and to regard the physician of Padua, like the author of the Divine Comedy, as a precursor of their own period rather than as a final representative and product of a rich earlier period of culture. Thus Scardeone in the sixteenth century spoke of him as the first medical translator from Greek into Latin since Roman days, forgetting earlier medieval translators of Greek medicine like Burgundio of Pisa and William of Moerbeke. And in the seventeenth century Tomasini called Peter “a man most illustrious, in genius, doctrine, and merits, in a rude and unhappy age,” while Naudé declared him “a man who appeared as a prodigy and a miracle in his age.” This depreciation of the times in which Peter had lived became accentuated, as in the similar case of Roger Bacon, by the report that he had been persecuted by the medieval church.
But completed the work of his period.
As a matter of fact, as Dante really closed the medieval period of the flourishing of vernacular literature and the age of romance, so Peter of Abano came in a sense at the close of a period or movement in the history of science. He thus not unnaturally occupied himself especially in supplementing, correcting, and reconciling the work of his predecessors. Some works that had been unsatisfactorily translated, he retranslated. Such important works of Aristotle, Galen, and others as he could find that had not yet been translated, he translated from Greek into Latin. He filled in the missing portion of the medical work of Yuhanna ibn Masawaih. And in his Conciliator, a tome of enormous bulk, he endeavored to reconcile and harmonize the conflicting opinions of the medical men and philosophers who had gone before him.
No mere compiler.