The House of Wisdom (17 page)

This Arab intellectual conception of the world was accompanied at times by some vital practical assistance. The Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, who had already completed his celebrated voyage around Africa’s southernmost point, the Cape of Good Hope, in 1497, was then guided to India by a Muslim map and, perhaps, even a Muslim pilot. According to a contemporary Portuguese account, da Gama and his officers were given a glimpse of a detailed map of the entire Indian coastline, “equipped with numerous meridians and parallels in the manner of the Moors.”
⁵⁵
Arab sources, acknowledging the calamity of allowing European powers to penetrate the Indian Ocean and its vital trade routes, all agree that the Muslim pilot must have been drunk at the time to commit such treachery against his fellow believers. Portuguese naval forces later captured invaluable maps of the eastern Spice Islands. These were rushed back to Lisbon for translation and incorporation into the Europeans’ increasingly accurate charts and atlases.

Christopher Columbus also benefited from the work of the Arabs, particularly a Latin translation in the mid-twelfth century of the Sabean Tables, which summarized the latest techniques of Arab mathematical geography. In addition, Columbus and other explorers of his generation were influenced by recent Christian interpretations of classical Arab and Hindu notions of a symmetrical earth, a worldview that supported Columbus’s strategy of going east by sailing west. They may also have been encouraged by their mistaken reading of the Arabic sources, particularly accounts of the Abbasid determination of the length of one degree, which led them to believe the earth was 20 percent smaller than it really is.
⁵⁶
Finally, there are suggestions that Muslim seafarers—Arab, Malian, and Chinese—all made early voyages into the distant reaches of the Sea of Darkness, possibly extending as far as the New World.

King Roger II was one of the first of a new breed of Europeans beginning to emerge from firsthand experience of the Arabs, not as enemies in holy war but as undisputed masters of science, philosophy, and high culture. He read Arabic and was widely familiar with the works of the leading Muslim scholars. Coins minted by Roger in 1138 are the earliest known in Europe to use the new Arabic numeral system popularized by al-Khwarizmi.
⁵⁷
His court physicians were all Arabs and, says the twelfth-century historian Ibn al-Athir, he relied on them more than on any Christian monk or priest at the palace.
⁵⁸
A Christian chronicler says the king above all else esteemed “honest and wise men, whether from his own land or born elsewhere, laymen or clerics.”
⁵⁹
So it was only natural that Roger would entrust his scientific lifework to a Muslim scholar.

Al-Idrisi himself tells us that Roger’s Map of the World project was rooted not in ignorance on the part of the king but rather in a deep dissatisfaction with the works of the earlier Arab geographers, including
The Book of Roads and Kingdoms
and the accounts of al-Masudi. Roger had pored over these and many other texts in search of an understanding of “other lands, [and] their division into the seven climate zones upon which the scholars agree.” But, says al-Idrisi, the king did not find the information he sought in any scholarly work. “In fact, he found them to be rather simpleminded.”
⁶⁰

Roger responded as would have al-Muqaddasi or any other self-respecting medieval Arab scholar: He collected more data and then sifted through the results in search of general trends and confirmed facts. Al-Idrisi recounts the king’s approach with his researchers: “They studied together, but did not find much extra knowledge from [other scholars] over what he found in the aforementioned work [of the Muslim geographers], and when he had convened with them on this subject he sent out into all his lands and ordered yet other scholars who may have been traveling around to come and asked them about their opinions both singly and collectively. But there was no agreement among them. However, where they agreed he accepted the information, but where they differed, he rejected it.”
⁶¹

According to al-Idrisi, this continued for fifteen years, until at last Roger was satisfied. He ordered the preliminary outlines of his Map of the World to be traced onto a special drawing board in accordance with the “opinion and consensus of the scholars.” Once the draft map’s “true description and pleasing form” was confirmed, the artisans began the laborious process of copying this prototype onto the large silver disk, in effect its final publication. Al-Idrisi says all that remained was the preparation of the hand-drawn sectional maps and the completion of his supporting text containing “the descriptions of the provinces and the appearance of their peoples, their dress and their adornments and the practicable roads and their mileage and
farsangs
[a traditional unit of measurement] and all the wonders of their lands as witnessed by travelers and mentioned by roaming writers and confirmed by narrators. Thus after each map we have entered everything we have thought necessary and suitable in its proper place in the book, as much as our knowledge and our ability will allow.”
⁶²

By any standard,
The Book of Roger
was a monumental achievement, more than anything for the sheer scope of the project and its success in assembling the views of so many learned sources across so many fields of knowledge. It also helped enshrine the Arab scientific method that reached back to the work of the early Islamic jurists and theologians. Most of all, it showcased the glories of Arab geography, a field in which the Muslim scholars greatly surpassed their Greek, Persian, and Hindu predecessors. This collaboration between the Muslim scholar and his charismatic Christian patron brought the Arab tradition to the very crossroads of the known world. As a Mediterranean power, Roger’s kingdom of Sicily and southern Italy maintained vital trade, diplomatic, and military relations with all the important states of East and West. From there,
The Book of Roger
, with its potent mix of ancient and modern traditions, was well placed to shape emerging Christian conceptions of the outside world.

The Book of Roger
enjoyed a long shelf life. Al-Idrisi’s work took special root in North Africa, where a family of Tunisian cartographers specialized in sophisticated navigational charts that incorporated many of his findings. Traces of his maps can also be found in Europe’s emerging tradition of portolan charts, navigational aids and coastal maps of considerable detail and accuracy. An abridged Arabic version of al-Idrisi’s masterpiece was printed in the West in 1592, one of the earliest secular Muslim works produced by Rome’s academic Medici Press and a sign of the book’s enduring importance. A Latin translation appeared in Paris twenty-seven years later, but the original text was credited only to an anonymous “Nubian geographer.”

In one of those odd footnotes to literary history, Edgar Allan Poe invokes this same Nubian geographer and the Sea of Darkness in his tale of nature’s overwhelming power and fury, “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” dated 1841.
⁶³
At the outset, Poe’s narrator recalls peering warily down from the heights of a craggy Norwegian cliff: “I looked dizzily, and beheld a wide expanse of ocean, whose waters wore so inky a hue as to bring at once to my mind the Nubian geographer’s account of the
Mare Tenebrarum
[the Sea of Darkness].” A French scholarly translation of
The Book of Roger
was produced in 1840 with an eye to improving contemporary Western knowledge of the world, particularly that of Africa, which was just emerging as a prize quarry in Europe’s great colonial expansion.
⁶⁴

Roger II died at age fifty-eight in early 1154, shortly after al-Idrisi’s text was completed. One spiteful churchman, no doubt reflecting popular gossip that this Arabized king kept a harem, tells us: “He himself surrendered to fate, overcome by early old age, both worn down by his immense efforts and more devoted to sexual activity than the body’s good health requires.”
⁶⁵
The more sympathetic archbishop of Salerno, Romuald, on the other hand, recalled a man “large of stature, corpulent, leonine of face, somewhat hoarse of voice; wise, far-seeing, careful, subtle of mind, great in counsel, preferring to use his intelligence rather than force.”
⁶⁶
Whatever Roger’s personality, it is clear that the king’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge, not to mention his patronage of al-Idrisi and his own deep involvement with
The Book of Roger
and the great Map of the World, comprise a legacy worthy of the tradition of the early Abbasid caliphs, such as al-Mansur and al-Mamun. This new hunger for the latest in Arab learning, still on the margins of European intellectual life, also fueled the pilgrimage to the East of Roger II’s intrepid contemporary, Adelard of Bath.

PART III

Al-Zuhr/Midday

Chapter Five

THE FIRST MAN OF SCIENCE

N
O ONE KNOWS
where Adelard learned Arabic—perhaps in Syracuse, on the once-Muslim island of Sicily, perhaps only later in Antioch itself. Before setting out for the East, he had asserted the common medieval notion that completely mastering the subject of grammar would ultimately give the reader access to any text in any tongue. He also noted the advantages of studying individual languages, suggesting he was well prepared to succeed at such an undertaking himself.
¹
Adelard tells us that he spent approximately seven years in and around the crusader lands able to communicate effectively with local scholars, something that would have required considerable facility with Arabic. Along the way, he mentions various Arab mentors who guided him in his research, and he worries aloud whether he may have attended so many lectures that they have blunted his memory. Among his teachers was a master of anatomy, an “old man of Tarsus,” in southern Asia Minor, not far from Antioch. His instructor, an adept at advanced Arab medicine, taught him sophisticated dissection techniques, including how to immerse a cadaver in running water to gently wear away the soft flesh and expose the body’s intricate networks of blood vessels and nerves.

The path Adelard traced to Antioch is almost as obscure as the course of his language studies. He provides only a handful of clues about his wanderings in search of the
studia Arabum
, leaving much to be reconstructed from scattered hints in his books and translations and a few obscure references from fellow scholars. In 1109, Adelard deposited his nephew and other students then in his charge at Laon, where he left them to the “insecurity of French opinions.” Almost immediately the trail goes cold, until he resurfaces five years later in the principality of Antioch, huddled on the “trembling bridge” at Mamistra during the earthquake. Given his earlier visit to the archbishop of Syracuse, memorialized in
On the Same and the Different
, it seems likely that he returned to Sicily and used it as his jumping-off point to the East. The island was linked to Antioch by close family ties between their respective Norman rulers, making communications, travel, and trade relatively easy.

At the time, Antioch was just beginning to emerge as an important center for the translation of Arabic texts into Latin, particularly in the field of medicine, where Muslim science was second to none. Traders from the Italian city-state of Pisa, who had earlier helped ferry the crusaders to the Holy Land in exchange for booty and territory, now wielded enormous influence in Antioch. They controlled their own quarter in the very center of the city and the whole of the nearby port of Latakia. As a result of these and other commercial and political links around the eastern Mediterranean, Pisa found itself to be a vital hub in the spread of Arab wisdom. Arabic texts seized by conquering Christian armies around the region swelled the book bazaars, transforming the city into something of an entrepôt of Muslim science. Antioch’s Pisan quarter bordered on the monastery of St. Paul, a Benedictine institution that surely would have welcomed Adelard, whose father, Fastrad, and mentor, Bishop John, were both prominent members of the same order back in Bath.

Like Adelard, the Italian translator and scholar Stephen of Pisa—sometimes known as Stephen the Philosopher—soon made his way to Antioch to learn from the Muslims. There he translated a prominent medical encyclopedia,
The Royal Book
, by Ali ibn al-Abbas al-Majusi, known in the West as Haly Abbas. This work, dating from the tenth century and comprising ten chapters on medical theory and another ten chapters on clinical practice, was already widely used across the Muslim world. Stephen’s Latin version quickly became a European standard as well. Stephen begins chapter eight, on medical practice, with a personal note: “… The translation from Arabic into Latin of Stephen the disciple of philosophy. He wrote the copy himself and completed it in the year from the passion of our Lord 1127, on Saturday, November the third, at Antioch. Thanks be to God, the beginning and end of things.”
²

To accompany the text, Stephen fashioned his own glossary of Arabic and Greek medical terms, with some Latin equivalents—a work so valuable that it was meticulously copied and recopied by hand in the West for hundreds of years and even printed centuries later, during the Renaissance. Stephen himself was apparently less impressed with his own handiwork; he was not a physician and instead considered himself a “disciple of philosophy.” Next time, he promises, he will translate something from among “all the secrets of philosophy that lie hidden in the Arabic tongue.”
³
Medicine, he notes, is but the lowest rung of the philosopher’s art, but one has to begin with the needs of the body before addressing the improvement of the soul.
⁴