Bronze Cannon and Mounting
In the matter of science especially, and far more than their forerunners the Romans, the Arabs were the heirs of the Greeks. If they far preferred Aristotle’s philosophy to that of Plato, it may have been because they saw in Plato what he actually was, namely one of the fathers of the Christian church, but it was certainly because Aristotle mingled the positive sciences with metaphysical speculation. Nevertheless Plato (Aflathoun), as well as Aristotle (Aristhathlis or Aristou), received from them the surname of Al-Elahi, or the Divine. It was not only on the masters, principes Scriptores, on Aristotle, Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Euclid, Ptolemy, Strabo, that their studies were directed and concentrated; there is no grammarian so mediocre, no rhetorician so poor, no sophist so subtle, that the Arabs have not translated and commented on him.
SCHOLASTICISM
It was in passing through their hands that the peripatetic doctrine engendered scholasticism. It is certain that, in the interminable wrangle between Realists and Nominalists the former leaned on the authority of Avicenna, the others on that of Averrhoës; it is certain, according to the observation of M. Hauréau,[j] that the philosopher Al-Kendi is often quoted by Alexander of Hales, Henry of Ghent and St. Bonaventura, whilst Al-Farabi furnished his aphorisms to William d’Auvergne, Vincent de Beauvais, and Albertus Magnus; and that this same William d’Auvergne prefers the Arabs far above the Greeks, finding the Greeks too much of philosophers and the Arabs more of theologians. Doubtless scholasticism was a vain and regrettable learning, for the schools of the Middle Ages, as Condillac says, resembled the knights’ tournaments, but, all the same, it produced some free thinkers, such as Johannes Scotus Erigena, Berengarius, Abélard, and William of Occam; and it was from it that, in after time, proceeded John Huss, Savonarola, Luther, Bruno, and Campanella.
After having laid hands on the various branches of the knowledge possessed by the ancient Greeks, who had remained superior to the Latins, in the sciences even more than in letters and not less than in the arts, and after having enlarged its domain in all directions, the Arabs laid it open to the nations of Europe, all of whom they had outdistanced. Spain was naturally the first to receive and spread their gifts. In the tenth century, in the most profound darkness of the Middle Ages, that country “to which,” says Haller,
o “the humanities fled together,” was the only one which accepted and welcomed those solid studies, which were everywhere else repelled and destroyed, even in Constantinople, since the time of Leo the Isaurian (717). Indeed, as early as the tenth century, when the Muzarab, John of Seville, translated the Holy Scriptures into Arabic, and when another Muzarab, Alvaro of Cordova, reproached his compatriots with forgetting their language and their law (legem suam nesciunt christiani et linguam propriam non advertunt Latini), in order to train themselves in the Arab doctrine (Arabico eloquio sublimati), Spain counted several illustrious scholars, Ayton, bishop of Vich, a Lupit of Barcelona, and a Joseph, who instructed Adalbero, archbishop of Rheims, all versed in mathematics and astronomy.
MATHEMATICAL SCIENCE
To Spain then came the small number of foreigners who were tormented by the desire to know. Gerbert (born in Auvergne about 930, elected pope in 999, under the name of Silvester II, died in 1003), so celebrated for his adventures, his learning, and his labours, after going through all the schools of France, Italy, and Germany without being able to satisfy the passion for instruction which possessed him, came finally to Spain to seek that physical and mathematical knowledge which raised such admiration in France, Germany, and Italy, whither he returned to spread them, that the prodigies of his learning could only be explained by the accusation of having delivered himself over to the devil.
Gerbert is unanimously credited with having been the first to introduce the use of Arabic figures into these countries, and with having added some elementary notions of algebra to the calculations of arithmetic. He also passes as the first constructor of clocks. Whether, as most of his biographers affirm, Gerbert pursued his studies as far as the homes of the Arabs in Cordova and Seville, or whether he only made a long sojourn in Catalonia and associated with the scholars of that country, as is witnessed to by his collection of Epistles, addressed in great part to Catalans like Borrell, count of Barcelona, Ayton, Joseph, and Lupit, it is none the less certain that Gerbert learned all he knew from the Arabs, and that that knowledge, so prodigious as to appear supernatural, was, as William of Malmesbury says, “stolen from the Saracens.”
His example and his success roused other foreigners to come and glean, where he had made so ample a harvest. The German Hermannus-Contractus (who died in 1054), author of the book, De Compositione Astrolabii; the English Adelard, who translated the first Arabic Euclid into Latin (about 1130); the Italian Campano of Novara, who published a Theory of the Planets; Daniel Morley; Otto of Freising; with Hermann the German; Plato of Tivoli; Gerard of Cremona, who translated at Toledo itself, Alhazen; Avicenna, Rhazes, Albucasis, and even Ptolemy’s Almagest, not from the Greek, but from the Arabic—that Gerard of Cremona of whom it was said: “At Toledo he lived, Toledo he raised to the stars”—all went in succession to gather in Spain the elements of mathematics, physics, and astronomy, which they carried thence to their compatriots.