Arnoldus Villanovanus, or Arnaud de Villeneuve, a Frenchman, is said to have been born in 1240, and to have practised medicine in Barcelona, where he incurred the enmity of the Church by reason of his heretical opinions, and was obliged to leave Spain. He led a wandering life, eventually settling in Sicily, under the protection of Frederick II., and acquired a great reputation as a physician. Summoned thence by Clement V., who lay sick at Avignon, he lost his life by shipwreck in 1313.
Johannes de Rupecissa, or Jean de Raquetaillade, a Franciscan friar who lived from about the middle to the end of the fourteenth century, wrote a number of treatises on alchemy, and described methods of making calomel and corrosive sublimate. He was accused of the practice of magic, and, by order of Innocent VI., was thrown into prison, where he died. He was buried at Villefranche.
George Ripley, an Englishman, Canon of Bridlington, practised alchemy during the second half of the fifteenth century. He spent some time in Italy in the service of Innocent VIII. On his return to England he became a Carmelite, and died in 1490. Like Bacon, he was charged with magic. According to Mundanus, he followed alchemy with such success that he was able to advance to the knights of St. John of Jerusalem large amounts of gold for the defence of the Isle of Rhodes against the Turks.
One of the most important names in connection with the history of alchemy is that of Basil Valentine. Of his personal history nothing is known. He was supposed to be a Benedictine monk who lived in Saxony during the latter half of the fifteenth century; but there are grounds for the belief that the numerous writings attributed to him are in reality the work of various hands. The attempt made by Maximilian I. to discover the identity of the author was unavailing, nor have subsequent inquiries had any better result. The collection of books bearing his name, first published in the beginning of the seventeenth century, reveals quite a remarkable number of chemical facts up to that time not generally known. The most important of these relate to antimony and its preparations, such as butter of antimony, powder of algaroth, oxide of antimony, etc. He seems to have known of arsenic, zinc, bismuth, and manganese. He described a number of mercurial preparations, and many of the salts of lead were known to him. He mentions fulminating gold, and was aware that iron could be coated with copper by immersion in a solution of blue vitriol. He knew of green vitriol and the double chloride of iron and ammonium, and gave the modes of making a considerable number of other metallic salts, such as the sal armoniacum, which we now know as sal ammoniac. He also appears to have prepared ether and the chloride and nitrate of ethyl.
There is reason to believe, as stated already, that many of the published works ascribed to these learned men are the work of obscure individuals who traded on their fame. What may with certainty be credited to them serves to show that their theoretical opinions had much in common. They all regarded the transmutation of metals and the existence of the philosopher’s stone as facts which could not be controverted. They followed Geber in assuming that all the metals were essentially compound in their nature, and consisted of the essence or “element” of mercury, united with different proportions of the essence or “element” of sulphur.
The alchemists were the professional chemists of their time, and many of them were practising physicians. Indeed, professional chemistry may be said to have originated out of the practice of physic. As the number of chemical products increased and their value in therapeutics became more and more appreciated, there arose another school of alchemists, whose energies were devoted, not to the transmutation of metals—which, however plausible as a belief, seemed hopeless of achievement—but to the more immediate practical benefits which it was recognised must follow from the closer association of chemistry and medicine. This school came to be known as the iatro-chemists. As their doctrines exercised a great influence upon the development of chemistry, it will be desirable to treat of them and their professors in a special chapter.
CHAPTER IV
The Philosopher’s Stone
During the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries the cult of alchemy attained to the dignity of a religion. Belief in transmutation and in the virtues and powers of the philosopher’s stone, in the universal medicine, the alkahest, and the elixir of life, formed its articles of faith. The position it acquired was due to some extent to the attitude towards it of the Romish Church. Many reputable bishops and fathers were professed alchemists; and chemical laboratories, as in the Egyptian temples, were to be found in monasteries throughout Christendom. Pope John XXII., who had a laboratory in his palace at Avignon, is the reputed author of a work, Ars Transmutatoria, published in 1557. But to a still larger extent it was due to the fact that alchemy appealed to some of the strongest of human motives—the wish for health, the fear of death, and the love of wealth. It was a cunningly devised system, which exploited the foibles and frailties of human nature. The policy of the Church, however, it should be said, was not consistently and uniformly favourable to alchemy. Its practices occasionally came under the papal ban, although at times, to suit the exigencies of Christian princes, the interdict was removed. Theosophy and mysticism were first imported into alchemy, not by Arabs, but by Christian workers. The intimate association of religion with alchemy during the Middle Ages is obvious in the writings of Lully, Albertus Magnus, Arnaud de Villeneuve, Basil Valentine, and other ecclesiastics. Invocations to divine authority are freely scattered over their pages. Even the lay alchemist professed to rule his life and conduct by the example and precepts of the good Bishop of Regensburg. He was directed to be patient, assiduous, and persevering; discreet and silent; to work alone; to shun the favour of princes and nobles, and to ask the divine blessing on each operation of trituration, sublimation, fixation, calcination, solution, distillation, and coagulation.
Although alchemy, at least in its decadent days, lived for the most part by its appeal to some of the lowest instincts of mankind, and is only worth notice as a transient phase in the history of science, a few details concerning the tenets and practices of its professors may be of interest to the curious reader. And first as regards the nature of the philosopher’s stone—the grand magistery, the quintessence. Many alchemists professed to have seen and handled it. It is usually described as a red powder. Lully mentions it under the name of Carbunculus. Paracelsus says that it was like a ruby, transparent and brittle as glass; Berigard de Pisa that it was of the colour of a wild poppy, with the smell of heated sea salt; Van Helmont that it was like saffron, with the lustre of glass. Helvetius describes it as of the colour of sulphur. Lastly, an unknown writer, under the pseudonym of “Kalid,” says that it may be of any colour—white, red, yellow, sky-blue, or green. As the substance was wholly mythical, a certain latitude of description may reasonably be expected. Some of the alchemists were of opinion that the magistery was of two kinds—the first, the grand magistery, needed for the production of gold; the second, the small magistery, only capable of ennobling a metal as far as the stage of silver. Then, as to the amounts required to effect a transmutation, accounts are equally discrepant. Arnaud de Villeneuve and Rupescissa assert that one part of the grand magistery will convert a hundred parts of a base metal into gold; Roger Bacon, a hundred thousand parts; Isaac of Holland, a million. Raymond Lully states that philosopher’s stone is of such power that even the gold produced by means of it will ennoble an infinitely large amount of a base metal.