Chapter X: Arab Civilisation (2)

It must be remembered that at the siege of Mecca in 690 a kind of bomb was already in use, and that in Egypt in the thirteenth century powdered nitre was used to throw projectiles to a great distance with a noise like thunder. It is also mentioned on the occasion of a naval battle between the king of Tunis and the emir of Seville in the eleventh century, in 1308 at the siege of Gibraltar, in 1324 at that of Baeza; also as used by Ismail, king of Granada in 1340 and by Algeciras in 1342, and Ferreras says positively that the balls were shot by means of powder. The Spanish thenceforth made use of it, and one sees the European armies little by little provided with cannon, while no mention is made of their trials and attempts which would necessarily have preceded the organisation of artillery if the actual invention of gunpowder had originated with Christian nations as some writers and historians have long claimed.

With regard to the compass, nothing proves that the Chinese used it for navigation, while we find the Arabs using it in the eleventh century, not only for sea voyages, but in caravan journeys through the desert, and to determine the azimuth of the Kiblah, that is the direction of the Moslem oratories towards Mecca. It was the same with paper. Towards the year 650 silk paper was already being made at Samarcand and Bokhara. In 706 Jusuf Amron at Mecca thought of substituting cotton for silk; hence the “damask paper,” of which Greek historians speak. In Spain, where linen and hemp were more common, arose factories for linen paper. “The Xativa paper,” says the geographer Edrisi, “is excellent and incomparable.” Valencia and Catalonia soon afterwards proved formidable rivals to Xativa (Jativa). In the thirteenth century Arabian paper was used at Castile, whence it penetrated into France, Italy, England, and Germany. But Arabian manuscripts always led in the fineness and glossiness of their paper, as well as in the choice of ornamentation in lively and brilliant colours.

It was thus that the influence exercised by the Arabs manifested itself in every branch of modern civilisation. From the ninth to the fifteenth century the most voluminous literature extant was formed, productions were multiplied; valuable inventions attested the wonderful activity of men’s minds at this epoch; and their influence, felt throughout Christian Europe, justified the opinion that the Arabs have led us in all things. On the one hand we find inestimable material for a history of the Middle Ages--narratives of voyages, the happy idea of the biographical dictionary; on the other, unequalled industry, buildings grandiose in thought and execution, important discoveries in the arts. Does not all this reveal the work of a people too long disdained?[g]

INFLUENCE OF THE ARABS ON EUROPEAN CIVILISATION

“The nations of Europe,” says Bailly in one of his letters to Voltaire, “after having grown old in barbarism, were only enlightened by the invasion of the Moors and the arrival of the Greeks.” We venture to add--and far more by the invasion of the Moors, or of those to whom Bailly gives the name, than by the arrival of the Greeks of the Lower Empire. And, indeed, one of the distinctive and prominent characteristics of the influence which the Arabs exercised on all branches of modern civilisation, is precisely that of having restored to Europe a knowledge of the ancient Greek authors, whose language, works, and even names, were completely forgotten.

It may be boldly asserted that the numerous translations and still more numerous commentaries which the Arabs wrote on all the works of Ancient Greece, and which makes their literature the second daughter of Greek literature, served to give the modern peoples their first notions of the sciences and letters of antiquity. It was only after having known them through the versions of the Arabs that the desire to possess and understand the original writers took shape, and that the language of Homer and Plato found several diligent interpreters. Indeed, “The greater part of Greek erudition,” according to Hyde,[h] “which we have to-day from those sources, we received first from the hands of the Arabs.”

In order to justify this assertion, which may seem a little paradoxical, it will be sufficient to call attention to the fact that the Arabs had transmitted to Europe, without disguising its origin, the knowledge they borrowed from the Greeks, long before Boccaccio’s guest, Leontius Pilatus, had started a course on the Greek language at Florence (about 1360), and the dispersal of the inhabitants of Constantinople, after the taking of that town by Muhammed II (1453), had rendered their idiom a common study in Europe. Indeed many Greek books, and notably those which treated of the sciences, were originally translated from Arab into Latin. Among others may be cited the earliest versions of Euclid and Ptolemy.

A not less certain proof that Greek letters first received an asylum from the Arabs, is that several works of Ancient Greece have been preserved by them, and discovered in their own works. Mathematicians, for instance, would never have possessed the _Sphericals_ of the geometrician Menelaus of Alexandria, who was antecedent to Ptolemy, but for the Arab translation (_Kitab al-Okar_), which was afterwards translated into Latin, nor the eight books of Apollonius of Perga’s _Conic Sections_, if the Maronite, Abraham Ecchellensis, had not copied and translated (1661) the missing fifth and sixth and seventh books from an Arab manuscript in the Medici library in Florence; neither would the doctors have been able to complete Galen’s Commentaries on Hippocrates’ _Epidemics_ without the Arab translation discovered in the Escurial, and the naturalists would not even possess an abridgement of Aristotle’s _Treatise on Stones_ but for the Arab manuscript in our (the French) National library.

If we trace the whole history of human knowledge, and recall the fact that Greece survived Rome in Alexandria, we may well assign the Arabs the position of guardians to that sacred depôt between Greece and the Renaissance. “They merit,” says M. Libri,[i] “eternal gratitude for having been the preservers of the learning of the Greeks and Hindus, when those people were no longer producing anything and Europe was still too ignorant to undertake the charge of the precious deposit. Efface the Arabs from history and the Renaissance of letters will be retarded in Europe by several centuries.”

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.

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.

ARCHITECTURE

As to the influence of Arabs on architecture, the only one of the fine arts which religion permitted Moslems to cultivate, it seems that it cannot be set in doubt that it appears with as much certainty as distinction. The question has often been asked: Whence came it that the architecture of the close of the Middle Ages, that which passed from the round to the pointed arch, and from basilicas to cathedrals, was called Gothic? As this name, if it implied a northern origin, would be in flagrant contradiction with the facts, the question has remained unanswered.

But we must remind ourselves that the name Gothic has not been given only to the architecture which the twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw prevailing. The handwriting and the missal, which in the year 1091 were replaced in Spain by the Latin (then called French) characters, and by the Roman ritual, were also called Gothic. They had received and preserved this name of Gothic because their use dated from the time when Spain was the domain of the Goths. Might it not also be because the first lessons in the new architecture came to Europe through Spain, that this architecture, _e.g._, like the Spanish handwriting and liturgy, was named Gothic?

This perfectly simple and natural explanation is, moreover, in complete accordance with history. The conjectures of men versed in the matter are agreed on this point--that modern architecture had its birth at Byzantium, that second Rome where the arts took refuge when they were driven out of Italy. The Byzantine architects, who were the first to mingle the capricious and flowery style of the East with the sober and regular style of ancient Greece, had two sorts of pupils--the Arabs and the Germanic peoples. The former first founded the architecture called Moorish or Saracen; and afterwards the latter, that which later on was called Gothic. Starting from the same point the two architectures remain analogous, almost similar, during two centuries, both preserving, with the differences imposed by the climate, the traditions of their common origin. Thus the mosque of Cordova, raised by a prince of Syria, and the old basilicas of Germany are equally sprung from the Byzantine style. Then they separate, to take each a style of its own. The Moslem architecture preserves the system of surbased naves, and takes as its special characteristic the horseshoe arch, that is to say, one narrowing at its base, and having the form of an inverted crescent.

Christian architecture adopts the system of high, pointed naves, and its distinctive characteristic becomes the pointed arch, substituted for the pagan round arch. But it must be noticed that the Arabs had employed the pointed arch before the Christians; that, in Spain especially, a multitude of monuments prove their use of this form which was unknown to antiquity; and that it is doubtless because the pointed arch, now become the striking and characteristic feature of Christian architecture, had passed from Spain into Europe, that the whole system was named Gothic. Finally, these two architectures derived from Byzantium, the Arab and the Germanic, becoming ever more and more assimilated, end by merging, at the close of eight centuries, into the style called Renaissance. No one denies, no one disputes, the striking resemblance which exists between the Arab monuments and those of Europe in the Middle Ages. This resemblance is not only found in the great edifices of the capitals, for the construction of which Saracen architects were sometimes called in, as happened in the case of Notre Dame de Paris itself. It can be traced even in the humblest buildings of the little towns.

“Thus,” says Viardot,[m] “I have found the multilobar arch of the Mezquita at Cordova in the cloisters of Norwich cathedral, and the delicate colonnette of the Alhambra in the church of Notre Dame at Dijon. This resemblance was, then, not merely casual and fortuitous; it was general and permanent. Nothing further is needed to prove the thesis. If Christian and Arab art resembled each other, and if one preceded the other, it is evident that of the two one was imitated and the other the imitator. Was it the Arab art which imitated the Christian art? No; for the priority of its works is manifest and incontestable; for Europe, in the Middle Ages, received all its knowledge from the Arabs, and must also have received from them the only art whose cultivation the law of religion permitted.”

MUSIC

The impossibility which exists, in spite of the efforts of all modern scholars, of our having an acquaintance, even an imperfect and approximate one, with the music of the Greeks, must teach and give a conception of the great difficulty of procuring proofs of the state of this art, or discovering and understanding monuments of it, once the traditions are interrupted. It is a dead language in which none can now read. In the preceding section we have had to limit ourselves to demonstrating that the Arabs cultivated music as a very important and very advanced art. In the archives of the chapter of Toledo, there exists a precious monument of the influence which they exercised on modern music. This is a manuscript, annotated in the hand of Alfonso the Wise himself, and including the canticles (_cantigas_) composed by that prince, with the music to which they were sung. In it we find not only the six notes _ut_, _re_, _mi_, _fa_, _sol_, _la_, invented, towards 1030, by the monk Guido of Arezzo, but also the seventh note, the five lines, and the keys, whose discovery was subsequent, and even the upward and downward tails of the notes, the use of which was not introduced into the musical writing of the rest of Europe until much later. Up till then music had served only for the psalmodies of the church, for the plain chant of hymns and antiphons. This manuscript, copied and cited in the _Paleographia Castellana_ is, according to all appearance, the most ancient monument of the regular application of music to ordinary and profane poetry.

As Alfonso X owes his prodigious learning chiefly to the study of the Arabs, it would be scarcely possible to doubt that, for this book as for all his works, he borrowed from them a science already formed and even then committed to writing by Al-Farabi, Abul-Faraj, etc., and which Alfonso might very well have understood with the help of the Muzarabs of Seville. This supposition, which would attribute to the Arabs a notable share in the creation of modern music, has all the more the appearance of truth since the first instruments adopted by the Spaniards, the French, and the other nations of Europe were named _moresques_ in all languages. To this day the _chirimia_ and _dulzaina_ of the Moors, so often mentioned by Cervantes and his contemporaries, are still used in the country of Valencia. As to the modern stringed instruments, they all had as model the lute (_al-aoud_, whence _laud_ in Spanish) of the Arabs, who have also given Spain the _kitara_ (_guitarra_), since become the national instrument of the people whose masters they were in all things.

Several theorists, J. J. Rousseau amongst others, have proposed to write music in figures, assuredly without suspecting that the Arabs had already practised that mode of notation. Kiesewetter[n] calls attention to the fact that, the Arab scale having seventeen intervals, the Arabs were able to write and actually did write music with their figures, employing the numbers one to eighteen for the first octave, one to thirty-five for two octaves, and so on. May it not be from this ancient use of the Arab figures in musical writing that the employment of the same figures for the figured bass, in which a simple number denotes a chord, came into vogue? It is possible and very probable.

The old Spanish music, that which is preserved in Andalusia under the name of _cañas_, _rondeñas_, _playeras_, etc., differing greatly from the _boleros_ of comic operas and eluding the modern notation, is certainly of Arab origin. Who are they who have preserved it in the tradition of this country? An eastern race, a nomadic race, that of those Bohemians who, coming from Egypt about the fourteenth century, and perhaps before that from India, spread themselves throughout Europe and were called _gitanos_ in Spain, _zingari_ in Italy, gipsies in England, _zigeuner_ in Germany, and _tzigani_ in Russia, whilst naming themselves _pharaons_.

These nomads, with their immutable customs, who are still to-day not only in Spain but in Russia the same in physique and moral character as Cervantes has depicted them, have carried and retained everywhere the ancient songs of their problematic country. As the musicians of the people, formed into troupes of singers and dancers, they have everywhere spread the form and sentiment of their antique melodies. “It was through them,” concludes Viardot, “that, in Russia as in Spain, popular music took or kept the oriental character; it was from them that in Moscow, at the foot of the towers of the Kremlin, I listened to the same songs as in the gardens of the Alhambra of Granada. In both places I had heard from their lips a living echo of the Arab music.”[m]