For Lust of Knowing (10 page)

Despite the widespread reaction against Arablearning, Averroism still had its champions and the University of Padua, in particular, remained a centre of Averroist studies and of Aristotelian scholarship more generally. The German Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64), who studied at Padua and who was influenced by Paduan Averroism, was a man of broad interests, including research into squaring the circle – an enterprise in which he believed he had succeeded. (Not until 1882 was it proved to be impossible.) He also developed a heliocentric model of the planetary system and he calculated that the end of the world was due in 1734. In 1448he became a cardinal and he played an important part in the negotiations to bring the Greek Orthodox Church into union with Rome. None of this concerns us here. In 1460 Nicholas of Cusa wrote
Cribratio Alcoran
(‘The Sieving of the Qur'an') in which he took a critical approach to the text of the Qur'an (or rather the inadequate Latin version that was available to him). He concluded that the Qur'an showed clear signs of having been influenced by Nestorian Christianity. Nestorians hold that the divinity and humanity of Christ were not united in a single self-conscious personality. However, the Jewish role in shaping the Qur'an was even more obvious to him. This influence came in two ways. First, Muhammad was guided by a hypothetical Jewish adviser and, secondly, after Muhammad's death, other Jews inserted anti-Christian polemic into the text of the Qur'an. Nicholas of Cusa's thesis can be considered as an early example of the application of critical techniques to the text of the Qur'an, albeit in a primitive and bungled fashion. His speculations about Christian and Jewish influence on the Qur'an would be picked up again in the nineteenth century. He had fastened on what he perceived to be the Christian elements in Islam, not in order to belittle the latter faith, but rather to demonstrate its compatibility with Christianity. If he could succeed in this, then he thought he might persuade the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II to convert to Christianity. Though his views found favour with his friend, Pope Pius II, they found no favour whatsoever with the Ottoman Sultan.
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The mystically minded and conciliatory Nicholas of Cusa sought to expound a common spiritual ground on which the Catholics, Greek Orthodox and Hussites could agree with one another and with the Muslims: ‘Religion and the worship of God, in all men endowed with the spirit, are fundamentally, in all the diversity of rites, one and the same.' The Italian nobleman Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), called ‘the phoenix of his age', was a more combative character. Pico studied first Hebrew and then Aramaic and Arabic. He was taught by Flavius Mithridates, a Jewish convert to Christianity, and by Elias de Medigo, another Jew, who also introduced Pico to Averroist thought. (Many of the Jews in fifteenth-century Italy had arrived there fleeing from Spanish persecution.) In the last quarter of the fifteenth century Christian cabalism, the Christian reinterpretation of certain esoteric rabbinic texts, started to become fashionable in intellectual circles in Italy and elsewhere. Pico, one of the founders of this movement, took up the study of Hebrew in order to master cabalism and then use the Cabala to demonstrate the truths of the Christian version of the Bible. He studied the text of the Bible for the hidden meanings that he thought it contained. ‘There is no knowledge which makes us more certain of the divinity of Christ than magic and Cabala.' He believed in the application of gematria (a cabalistic method of interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures by interchanging words whose letters have the same numerical value when added) in order to tease out the hidden meaning of the biblical text. As the primal language, the one spoken by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the Hebrew language contained magical properties found in none of its successor languages.

Though enthusiastic about ancient Hebrew wisdom, Pico's attitude to Arabic learning was ambivalent and, despite his studies in Oriental languages, he was hostile to the Arabphilosophers: ‘Leave to us in Heaven's name Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, and keep your Omar, your Alchibitius, your Abenzoar, your Abenragel.' He also denounced Arabic poetry (though, like Petrarch, he seems to have avoided reading any). Yet, for all Pico's professed contempt for Arablearning, he opened his famous
Oration on the Dignity of Man
(
c.
1486) by
referring to his reading of ‘the records of the Arabians' and quoting a certain ‘Abdala the Saracen' who, when asked what was the most wonderful thing in the world, replied: ‘There is nothing to be seen more wonderful than man.' Although the declamation that followed was mostly supported by quotations from classical Latin authors and appeals to the authority of the ancient Hebrews and the Zoroastrians, Pico also had words of praise for the Arabthinkers: Averroes, Avempace (more correctly, Ibn Bajja), al-Farabi, Avicenna and al-Kindi. Similarly, in his hardly less well-known treatise against astrology, he cited Avicenna and Averroes. (Even if one despised Arabic learning, it was still desirable to appeal to its authority.) Incidentally, it is worth noting that Pico did not attack astrology from the point of view of a modern rationalist but rather as a defender of another branch of occultism, known as natural magic. Pico died young and in the long run his preoccupations and style of thinking influenced only a handful of eccentric intellectuals. In his own lifetime, several of his cabalistic theses were condemned as heretical by the Church and many of the Hermetic texts whose antiquity Pico had placed his faith in, were subsequently shown to be forgeries of late antiquity.
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Pico and his contemporaries were fascinated by what little they knew about ancient Egypt. In the fifteenth century Egypt was thought of as the source of most of what later came to be identified as Greek culture – a theory that has been quite recently revived and vigorously and controversially argued by Martin Bernal.
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Renaissance Platonists, such as Marsilio Ficino, believed that Egyptian hieroglyphs represented Platonic ideas about the universe and divine things. The Egyptian priesthood used the esoteric hieroglyphs to conceal divine mysteries from the profane.
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It was Ficino who in 1471 translated the
Corpus Hermeticum
from Greek into Latin. This was a body of Platonist and occult writings attributed to an ancient and semi-divine sage Hermes Trismegistus, who in some of his aspects can be considered as a classicized version of the Egyptian god, Thoth. Pico naively believed in the literal existence of this figure and in what seemed to be cryptic prophecies of the coming of Christ by Hermes Trismegistus.
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As we shall see, early in the next century Isaac Casaubon was to demonstrate that Pico's faith in the authenticity and antiquity of the Hermetic writings was misplaced. In the seventeenth
century, that fascinating thinker Athanasius Kircher (on whom, see the next chapter) would make a more determined assault on the mysteries of the hieroglyphs. However, primitive Egyptology, based on false premises and fuelling wild hopes of rediscovering lost ancient wisdom, made even less progress in the centuries that immediately followed than Arabic studies did. Study of the language and culture of the ancient Egyptians became the intellectually marginalized province of dabblers in cabalism, Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry.

The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were the great age of the Muslim empires: Mughal India, Safavid Persia, Mamluk Egypt and Syria, and Ottoman Turkey. Several European observers warned that Christendom was a shrinking island surrounded by the rising tide of Islam. The fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II in 1453 seemed to threaten Christendom's very survival. Its capture by the Turks was not only a political and military disaster, but also a cultural disaster for humanist Europe. As Aeneas Sylvius (later Pope Pius II) wrote, it was ‘the second death of Homer and Plato'. The conquest of Constantinople was followed by further Turkish conquests of Greek islands and Balkan territories. In 1521 Suleiman the Magnificent captured Belgrade and then destroyed the Hungarian army at the Battle of Mohacs in 1526and the Turks besieged Hapsburg Vienna for the first time in 1529. A little to the east, the Turks were pushing on into what is nowadays Romania. In the Mediterranean they occupied Rhodes in 1522, Cyprus in 1571and Crete in 1669. Elsewhere in the world, particularly in South East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, Islam continued to make converts and expand its territory. A significant number of those who fought for the Ottomans and who commanded or crewed the ships of the Barbary corsairs were European renegades who had converted from Christianity to Islam. Such cases were widely publicized and denounced from pulpits across Europe.
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Christendom was under siege.

Only in the West had Christian armies made significant gains from
Islam. In 1492 what was left of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada surrendered to the Spanish Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella. That same year Columbus set out on his voyage of exploration across the Atlantic. His venture had been inspired by the ideology of the Crusades. He hoped to gain independent trading access to the wealth of the Indies and to outflank the Islamic empires of the Ottomans, Mamluks and Safavids. He believed that he lived very close to the Last Days and he was inspired by knowledge that astrologers had predicted the imminent collapse of Muhammad's sect and the coming of the Antichrist. Columbus set out his aims in a document addressed to Ferdinand and Isabella: ‘Your Highnesses, as good Christian and Catholic princes, devout and propagators of the Christian faith, as well as enemies of the sect of Mahomet and of all idolatries and heresies, conceived the plan of sending me, Christopher Columbus, to this country of the Indies, there to see the princes, the peoples, the territory, their disposition and all things else, and the way in which one might convert these regions to our holy faith.'
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When Columbus set sail across the Atlantic, he was careful to include in the ship's complement an Arabic-speaking Jew, for his expectation was that they would reach the East Indies, where there were known to be many Arabic-speaking Muslim traders in the ports of China, Malaysia and India. It must have been somewhat disappointing to discover when he first touched land that the Caribs were quite ignorant of Arabic.

There was at first a reluctance to acknowledge that America really was a new and different continent. Benito Arias Montano, Spanish organizer of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible project, was so convinced that America must have been known to authors of the Bible that he added to the texts of the Antwerp edition a list of the Hebrew forms of American place names that he thought he had discovered in the Bible.
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The Fleming Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the Hapsburg ambassador to Ottoman Istanbul from 1554to 1562, believed that the Christian powers were wasting their time and resources in America, while Christianity's very survival was threatened by Ottoman advances in Europe and he denounced those who wasted resources in ‘seeking the Indies and the Antipodes across vast fields of ocean, in search of gold'. Some Turkish observers, however, were more perceptive.
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Around 1580an Ottoman geographer, the author of
Tarikh al-Hind al-Garbi
(‘History of the India of the West'), warned that the European settlements on the coasts of the Americas posed long-term economic dangers to the prosperity and survival of the sultanate.
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True to the crusading spirit of Columbus, when the Spaniards did set about colonizing the Americas, they conducted themselves as if they were fighting a new holy war. The literature of the period frequently compared the barbarous, pagan American Indians to the Muslims and both were regularly accused by Christian writers of idolatry, sodomy and indolence.
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The discovery of America also fostered a renewed enthusiasm for travel literature. Curiously, however, people were far more interested in reading about the Islamic lands and the lands yet further east than they were in reading about the New World. Giambattista Ramusio published an extremely popular collection of travel narratives,
Racolta de Navigazioni et viaggi
(Venice, 1550–59), and it was chiefly through Ramusio's collection that Marco Polo's account of his journey to the Great Khan became better known. In the 1580s and 1590s Richard Hakluyt published a series of narratives of exploration, mostly concerning voyages to the Americas. Then, in 1613, Samuel Purchas published an English equivalent to Ramusio's anthology,
Purchas his Pilgrimage, or Relations of the World and the Religions observed in all the Ages
, and in 1625he followed this up with two further books which collected together travellers' accounts of all parts of the then known world. Purchas was a fervent partisan for Mandeville's travel writings. The account given by Purchas of Xanadu was to inspire Coleridge's famous poem. As the title of Purchas's collection suggests, he conceived of travelling as a kind of act of piety.
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Pilgrimage to the Holy Land was still very popular in the last decades of the fifteenth century and a copious and repetitive literature of pilgrimage was produced in that period. Thereafter the fashion for actually going on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, as opposed to reading about it, declined steeply. Even so, those who travelled in the East
often modelled their narratives on the precedents provided by literary pilgrims, as did, for example, Jean Thenaud who accompanied the French ambassador to the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt, Qansuh al-Ghuri, in 1512.
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Pierre Belon was another literary traveller who went out in the entourage of a French ambassador, though he went to Istanbul in the 1540s. Belon was a naturalist who investigated the zoology and botany of Turkey, Egypt and Syria and the results of those researches appeared in
Les observations de plusieurs singularitez et choses memorables trouvées en Grece, Asie, Iudée, Égypte Arabie et autres pays estranges
(1554). Belon, who was also responsible for introducing hitherto unknown Middle Eastern plants to France, was murdered in 1564, possibly by a Huguenot.
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Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq (1522–92), the Hapsburg ambassador in Constantinople who feared that the Turks were making gains in Europe while the Christian powers squandered their resources in America, has already been mentioned. Like many diplomats in the early modern period, Busbecq also pursued a wide range of scholarly interests, as a linguist, antiquarian, zoologist and botanist. When he returned to Europe he brought with him 264 Greek manuscripts, as well as a considerable collection of Greek and Roman coins and six female camels. His letters from Turkey to a friend, initially published in Latin as the
Itinera Constantinopolitanum et Amasium. Eiusdem…de acie contra Turcam instruenda consilium
(1581), gave a portrait of Turkish life that is infused with a classicist's sensibility and quotations from Pliny, Polybius, Galen and Plautus.
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