Montucla[k] not only says that “the Arabs were long the sole depositaries of learning, and that it is to their commerce that we owe the first rays of light which came to chase away the darkness of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries”; he adds that “during this period, all who obtained the greatest reputation in mathematics had been to acquire their knowledge amongst the Arabs.” It is asserted that all the authors who wrote on the exact sciences before the fifteenth century did nothing but copy the Arabs, or, at the most, enlarge upon their lessons. Such were the Italian Leonardo da Pisa, the Polish Vitellio, the Spaniard Raymond Lully, the English Roger Bacon, and finally the French Arnauld de Villeneuve, who is credited with having discovered spirits of wine, oil of turpentine, and other chemical preparations.
During the same period, the whole of European geography was limited to the Seven Climates of Edrisi, and, in the seventeenth century, when correcting by Abu Ishak Ibrahim ben Yahya certain geographical errors, Abraham Hinckelmann was able to say: “The greatest assistance and illumination for posterity we owe to Arabism.” As to the famous Astronomical Tables of Alfonso X, they, like his book on Armillaries or celebrated spheres, only sum up the discoveries of the Arabs previous to the thirteenth century. It was from their works that all his learning was drawn by that celebrated monarch, who received the surname of the Wise (or learned), and who did indeed effect some advancement in science, between the system of Ptolemy and that of Copernicus. The Alphonsine Tables are borrowed from the various Ziji or tables of the Arab astronomers, and reproduce their form and substance.
When Louis XIV had a degree of the meridian measured geometrically, in order to determine the size of the earth, he doubtless did not know that five centuries before, the caliph Al-Mamun had ordered the same operation to be performed by his astronomers at Baghdad. In the Middle Ages, according to Bailly,[l] “the first step taken towards the revival of learning was the translation of Alfergan’s Elements of Astronomy.” That famous Spanish rabbi, Aben-hezra (or Esdra), who was surnamed the Great, the Wise, the Admirable, on account of his book on The Sphere, was born at Toledo, in 1119, and had been a disciple of the Arabs in astronomy. He spread his masters’ lessons throughout Europe. It was from Albategnius, more than from Ptolemy, that Sacrobosco (John of Holywood) had drawn the materials for his book De Sphera Mundi; it was in Albategnius, too, that the commentator on that great astronomer, Regiomontanus (Johann Müller, of Königsberg, Regius Mons), had found the first notion of tangents. It was from Alhazen’s Twilight that the illustrious Kepler took his ideas of atmospheric refraction; and it may be that Newton himself owes to the Arabs, rather than to the apple in his orchard at Woolsthorpe, the first apperception of the system of the universe; for Muhammed ben Musa (quoted in the Bibliot. arab. Philosophorum) seems, when writing his books on The Movement of the Celestial Bodies and on The Force of Attraction, to have had an inkling of the great law of general harmony.
MEDICINE
The influence of the Arabs on all the natural sciences, chemical or medical, is not less incontestable than their influence on the mathematical sciences. Roger Bacon and Raymond Lully were as much their pupils in the attempted science of alchemy, the “grand art,” as in the actual science of numerical calculations. It was by them also that Albertus Magnus (Albrecht Grotus or Gross, born in Swabia in 1193), that universal scholar, the eminent master of St. Thomas Aquinas, whom, like Gerbert, men called “the magician,” was initiated into all the learning of the Aristotelian school. And even after the year 1600, Fabricius Acquapendente could say, “Celsus amongst the Latins, Paulus Ægineta amongst the Greeks, and Albucasis amongst the Arabs, form a triumvirate to whom I confess that I am under the greatest obligations.”
Even as the astronomer Albategnius in the domain of heaven, or the geographer Edrisi in that of the earth, so Avicenna and Averrhoës reigned supreme over medicine, during six hundred years, down to the sixteenth century. At Montpellier and Louvain, commentaries on Avicenna were still being made in the last century. Both Boerhaave and Haller concede this long predominance to Arab medicine, and Brucker could say with perfect truth: “Until the renascence of literature, not only among the Arabs, but also indeed among the Christians, Avicenna rules all but alone.” When, in the very beginning of the thirteenth century, the Portuguese doctor Pedro Juan, who was archbishop of Braga and then pope under the title of John XXI, wrote his Treasury of the Poor, or Remedies for all Maladies, his Treatise on Hygiene, and his Treatise on the Formation of Man, he was copying the Arabs.
It was from Spain then that all the doctors of Europe came, and that, through them, the taste for science and letters was extended. “The Spanish doctors,” says Haller, “while their people were gradually recovering the country, communicated the love of letters to the Italians.” It was to Spain, at all events, that the Jews, then so renowned for their healing art, went to study, to afterwards scatter, like young doctors leaving the university, through the various countries of Europe. Kings and popes took their doctors from the Jews. To cite only a few famous instances, we call attention to the fact that the physician of Alfonso the Fighter, king of Aragon, Pedro Alfonso, author of some Latin tales, part of which were translated in Francesco Sansovino’s Cento Novelle Antiche, was a converted Jew; and Paul Ricius, physician to the emperor Maximilian I, was a Jew who remained a Jew. The latter had studied in Spain, where he translated the at-Takrif of Albucasis, the book which Haller calls the “common fountain” of modern medicine. We have seen that the Arabs practised a multitude of surgical operations, unknown to the ancients, and in like manner enriched pharmacy by a multitude of new medicaments.
But one fact sums up in itself all the proofs of the influence which the Arabs exerted on the medical art, and that is that the famous school of Salerno, whose laws were once followed throughout Europe, owes its origin to the Arabs. When (about 1000) the Norman, Robert Guiscard, took Salerno from the people called Saracens, who had occupied the south of Italy for more than two centuries, he found a school of medicine established there by these infidels. He had the wisdom to preserve it, enrich it, and to give it Constantine Africanus as chief. This man was a Moor from Carthage, whom travels and adventures flung, like Edrisi, into the power of the Normans of Sicily; who took the cowl at the monastery of Monte Cassino under the celebrated abbot Desiderius, afterwards Pope Victor III; and, in his retreat, translated into Latin all his compatriots’ works on the healing art. He thus ended by founding the school of Salerno, for it was from his works that all the aphorisms of the Medicina Salertina were taken. As the University of Montpellier had for founders (about 1200) the Aragonese, to whom that town, which was then almost modern and had not yet inherited the bishopric of Maguelonne, at that time belonged, it may be asserted, according to the generally received tradition, that its faculty of medicine was founded at least indirectly by the Arabs, and that it was in that sense grounded on their teaching—the sole adopted, the sole reigning one, the most enlightened and scientific of the age.