VIII.
THE RETURN OF GREEK ASTRONOMY
TO EUROPE.
a.d. 1000 to 1300.
“He hath made everything beautiful in His time; also He hath set the infinite in their heart.”
In the whole cycle of the changing year there is no moment so wonderful in northern climes as that which comes in early February, when winter is not yet past, but for the first time the promise of spring is felt in the air. Not a leaf has unfolded its green, but the swelling buds on the trees make a purple flush all over the woods, the blackbird sings an exultant strain, and in some sheltered copse you may find a delicate daring primrose already in bloom.
Such a moment in the history of Europe was the year 1000 Anno Domini. After the apathy, the ignorance, the despair of the Dark Ages, a new spirit began to breathe hope into the hearts of men. A love of beauty, a new religious fervour, a passionate desire for knowledge took possession of them. Yet it was nearly a hundred years before the great universities which were one expression of this new spirit sprang up in Paris, Bologna, Oxford, to be followed later by similar centres of intellectual activity in all parts of Europe.
By the end of the twelfth century it is said that there were 100,000 students in Bologna. A large number were foreigners from many lands, for as Latin was the universal tongue in education, all nations could understand each other, and scholars often wandered from one university to another, attracted by the fame of some great master. Similarly the doctors would teach first in one town and then another. Men of all ages and classes met together, for among the students were young boys and elderly ecclesiastics, poor scholars who begged their bread, and rich nobles who came with a tutor, a chaplain, and a whole suite of servants. There were no colleges or even lecture-halls: the students joined together in small groups to take a house and share expenses, and the professor lectured in his own house, or in a hired room, or, if the audience was large, in a city square, speaking from an open-air pulpit. All were united in the ardent pursuit of learning, and none complained if the floors were merely covered with straw, and the lectures, which often lasted three hours, began before sunrise on winter mornings in rooms which had no light and no fire. Was it not enough that when leaving at the end of university life one was technically said to be “going home a wise man”?
One cause of this intellectual fervour was the influence of Arab culture, with which Europe came into contact through the crusades, and through the Saracens in Sicily, and the Moors in Spain. For this reason astronomy and astrology took a high rank among the new studies. To distinguish between the two is quite a modern idea, and in mediæval times either name was used indifferently to cover both subjects. In Bologna university in the thirteenth century an important school of medicine and arts arose, through Arab influence, and the Arab doctors of medicine introduced the system of astronomy which they had learned from the Greeks. “A doctor without astrology,” it was said, “is like an eye that cannot see;” and before prescribing for a patient it was thought quite as important to determine the positions of the planets, as the nature of the disease. By the beginning of the fourteenth century there were salaried professors of astrology in Bologna, and they were more highly esteemed than any other professors except those of philosophy.
