a.d. 1000 to 1300.
In the whole cycle of the changing year there is no moment so wonderful in northern climes as that which comes in early February, when winter is not yet past, but for the first time the promise of spring is felt in the air. Not a leaf has unfolded its green, but the swelling buds on the trees make a purple flush all over the woods, the blackbird sings an exultant strain, and in some sheltered copse you may find a delicate daring primrose already in bloom.
Such a moment in the history of Europe was the year 1000 Anno Domini. After the apathy, the ignorance, the despair of the Dark Ages, a new spirit began to breathe hope into the hearts of men. A love of beauty, a new religious fervour, a passionate desire for knowledge took possession of them. Yet it was nearly a hundred years before the great universities which were one expression of this new spirit sprang up in Paris, Bologna, Oxford, to be followed later by similar centres of intellectual activity in all parts of Europe.
By the end of the twelfth century it is said that there were 100,000 students in Bologna. A large number were foreigners from many lands, for as Latin was the universal tongue in education, all nations could understand each other, and scholars often wandered from one university to another, attracted by the fame of some great master. Similarly the doctors would teach first in one town and then another. Men of all ages and classes met together, for among the students were young boys and elderly ecclesiastics, poor scholars who begged their bread, and rich nobles who came with a tutor, a chaplain, and a whole suite of servants. There were no colleges or even lecture-halls: the students joined together in small groups to take a house and share expenses, and the professor lectured in his own house, or in a hired room, or, if the audience was large, in a city square, speaking from an open-air pulpit. All were united in the ardent pursuit of learning, and none complained if the floors were merely covered with straw, and the lectures, which often lasted three hours, began before sunrise on winter mornings in rooms which had no light and no fire. Was it not enough that when leaving at the end of university life one was technically said to be “going home a wise man”?
One cause of this intellectual fervour was the influence of Arab culture, with which Europe came into contact through the crusades, and through the Saracens in Sicily, and the Moors in Spain. For this reason astronomy and astrology took a high rank among the new studies. To distinguish between the two is quite a modern idea, and in mediæval times either name was used indifferently to cover both subjects. In Bologna university in the thirteenth century an important school of medicine and arts arose, through Arab influence, and the Arab doctors of medicine introduced the system of astronomy which they had learned from the Greeks. “A doctor without astrology,” it was said, “is like an eye that cannot see;” and before prescribing for a patient it was thought quite as important to determine the positions of the planets, as the nature of the disease. By the beginning of the fourteenth century there were salaried professors of astrology in Bologna, and they were more highly esteemed than any other professors except those of philosophy.
One of their duties was to provide “judgments” (i.e. to cast the horoscope) gratis for students. But the dignity was a perilous one. Legitimate prediction by astrology bordered close on necromancy, which was banned by the Church, and one of Bologna’s most famous professors in astrology, the learned Cecco d’Ascoli, was burned at the stake in Florence in 1327 for the crime of sorcery.
Astronomy, like other subjects, was taught chiefly by lectures and “repetitions,” or classes for catechizing the students on what they had already heard. Books could also be had, though they were dear, on hire or purchase, from the university “stationers” or librarians.
The first books on Greek astronomy which found their way into European universities were Latin translations of Arabic commentaries and paraphrases of Aristotle, which travelled from Moorish academies in Spain to Paris. The astronomical treatises with strange technical terms in Arabic were hard work to translate, especially when they had already passed through several languages, as often happened. Thus it was possible to possess a work of Aristotle which was a Latin translation of a Hebrew translation of a commentary upon an Arabic translation of a Syriac translation of the original Greek text!
But meanwhile some of Aristotle’s works in the Greek entered Italy from the East, as a result of the crusading conquest of Constantinople in 1204. The first translations of these into Latin were very poor, but later on St. Thomas Aquinas, with the help of Pope Urban IV., had a better version made.
It was long before a good Latin version of Ptolemy’s Almagest could be obtained. A translation was made from the Arabic in 1230, at the bidding of the Emperor Frederick II., who did much, at his Sicilian court, to encourage Arab literature, but this translation was not much known or used.[70] The teachings of the Almagest became known chiefly through popular expositions such as those of Alfraganus, Albategnius, and John Halifax of Holywood, an English monk who became famous under his Latinized name of Sacrobosco. He was not an astronomer but had studied Greek and Arab writings, and finding that the study of astronomy was neglected because books on the subject were difficult both to procure and to understand, he compiled a useful handbook, which became widely popular and remained so for several centuries. Several other writers, notably Roger Bacon, wrote on the spheres, on the use of astrolabes, and on astrology. The books prescribed in Bologna for the course in Astrology and Mathematics were as follows:—
From the above we gather that a past master in Astrology would understand the elements of mathematics, and all the astronomy that Ptolemy’s translator or commentator could teach; that he had learned—at least in theory—the use of astronomical instruments and tables, and a good deal of astrology, including its use in medical practice. The tables were intended mainly for astrological predictions. The standard Alfonsine Tables had been drawn up in 1252 by Christians, Jews, and Moors, under the direction of Alfonso X. king of Castile. They contained lists of positions of the planets, dates of Easter moons, “golden numbers” and “dominical letters” of the ecclesiastical calendar, times and other details of eclipses, together with methods for finding the places of planets, and for casting horoscopes. This is the Alfonso who was so much shocked at the complexity of Ptolemy’s multitudinous circles that “the ointment of his name is marred,” says Fuller, “with the dead fly of his atheisticall speech”: “If only the Creator had consulted me, when He made the world, I would have given some good advice!”
Not one of all these books pretended to add any new discovery to astronomy: all intellectual energy was absorbed in eagerly assimilating the knowledge stored by Greeks and Arabs. Nor were any great observatories founded in Europe yet, in imitation of Alexandria, Rhodes, or Baghdad. The instruments in use were celestial globes and small portable astrolabes and quadrants for determining positions and angular distances between the heavenly bodies. The learned pope, Sylvester II., who had studied astronomy among the Moors in Spain, was so skilful in making astrolabes that some accused him of gaining the art by selling his soul to the devil!
When Aristotle first came to Paris (about 1200 a.d.), in Oriental dress, and accompanied by Moslem authors, the Council of Paris denounced him as an infidel; yet in less than fifty years all his works were placed on the list of books prescribed in the university course. This was brought about by the Dominicans. In six of his twenty-one ponderous volumes the German friar Albertus Magnus paraphrased the whole of Aristotle’s works, and stripping his philosophy of the pantheistic and materialistic garb in which the Spanish Arab Averroës had clothed it, presented the Greek philosopher as an ally of Christianity. The Italian saint, Thomas Aquinas, pupil of Albertus, in his much more readable commentaries and treatises, popularized this idea so successfully that Aristotle—the Philosopher, as he was called—speedily became as great an authority on every other subject as he had always been on logic.
It was a mutual victory. Aquinas captured the Greek for the Christian faith; Aristotle won the western world to accept his theories. No longer was the doctrine of a spherical Earth called “an old heathen theory”: it was almost an integral part of the Catholic faith. Aristotle’s demonstration that there must be a First Mover, himself unmoved, became an argument for the existence of the Christian Deity; the intelligences which preside over the celestial movements were interpreted as the nine hierarchies of angels whose existence was taught by the Church. To the eight spheres of the Greeks and the Primum Mobile of the Arabs, the thirteenth-century Christians added the all-embracing heaven of heavens, the Empyrean, to be the abode of the Creator and blessed spirits. Within the central immoveable earth they placed Purgatory and the fires of Hell. They accepted the limits of the habitable earth as laid down by Ptolemy, but kept Jerusalem as the centre by asserting that it was situated 90° from the Pillars of Hercules, and 90° from the mouths of the Ganges. Eden, the earthly paradise of Adam and Eve, was represented on contemporary maps as in the extreme East, separated by sea from the eastern boundary of the inhabited earth.
Thus theology and science supported one another. All learning was sacred, and all that man’s mind is capable of understanding he might aspire to know, for the search if rightly pursued would lead at last to the perfect bliss of beholding with unveiled eyes the Source of all Truth.