The House of Wisdom Read online

  22. Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999), 270.

  23. A. al-Azmeh, “Barbarians in Arab Eyes,” Past and Present 134 (1992): 7.

  24. Al-Masudi, Kitab al-Tanbih wa’l-ishraf in Islam from the Prophet Muhammad to the Capture of Constantinople, trans. and ed. Bernard Lewis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 2: 122.

  25. Runciman, The First Crusade, 139–49 (see Prologue, n. 5).

  26. E. S. Bouchier, A Short History of Antioch (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1921), 231–32.

  27. Raymond of Aguilers, Historia francorum qui ceperint Jerusalem, quoted in R. B. Yewdale, Bohemond I, Prince of Antioch (Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert, 1970), 53.

  28. Fulcher of Chartres, 43–44.

  29. Thomas S. Asbridge, The Creation of the Principality of Antioch, 1098–1 130 (Woodbridge, UK:

  Boydell Press, 2000), 48.

  30. Abu Saad al-Harawi quoted in Amin Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, trans. Jon Rothschild (New York: Schocken Books, 1984), xiii. Maalouf notes that not all Arab historians attribute these exact words to al-Harawi. Ibn al-Athir, for example, attributes them to a poet who had been inspired by al-Harawi’s lament.

  31. Usama ibn Munqidh, The Book of Contemplation: Islam and the Crusades, trans. Paul M. Cobb (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Classics, 2008), 144.

  32. Maalouf, Crusades Through Arab Eyes, 39–40.

  33. Ibid., 39–40.

  34. Hillenbrand, Crusades, 260.

  35. Ibn Munqidh, Book of Contemplation, 146.

  36. Ibid., 144.

  37. Ibid., 153.

  38. Hillenbrand, Crusades, 258.

  39. Ibn al-Arabi, quoted in Hillenbrand, Crusades, 49. Ibn al-Arabi was a religious scholar from al-Andalus, not the more famous Muslim mystic of the same name.

  40. Raymond of Aguilers, “Historia Francorum,” in First Crusades, Krey, 261.

  41. First Crusade, Peters, 14–15.

  42. Cronica de Alfonso III, quoted in Phillip F. Kennedy, “Christian-Muslim Frontier in al-Andalus,” in The Arab Influence in Medieval Europe, ed. Dionisius A. Agius and Richard Hitchcock (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 1994), 86.

  43. Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Oxford: One World, 1993), 135–36.

  44. Ibid., 133.

  45. Raymond of Aguilers, “Historia Francorum,” in First Crusades, Krey, 260.

  46. “Le Chanson d’Antioch,” in First Crusade, Peters, 305.

  47. Nikita Elisseeff, “The Reaction of the Syrian Muslims After the Foundation of the First Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem,” in Crusaders and Muslims in Twelfth-Century Syria, ed. Maya Shatzmiller (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1993), 163.

  48. Hillenbrand, Crusades, 72.

  49. Ibid., 73–74.

  50. Daniel, Islam and the West, 137.

  51. Atiya, Crusade, 171 (see Prologue, n. 8).

  52. David Abulafia, “The Role of Trade in Muslim-Christian Contact During the Middle Ages,” in Arab Influence, Agius and Hitchcock, I.

  53. Ibid., 10.

  Chapter 2: The Earth Is Like a Wheel

  1. Adelard of Bath, Burnett, 3 (see Prologue, n. 4).

  2. Riley-Smith, First Crusade, 8 (see chap. I, n. 7).

  3. A. C. Crombie, Augustine to Galileo (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 1: 32.

  4. Louise Cochrane, Adelard of Bath: The First English Scientist (London: British Museum Press, 1994), 24.

  5. The eight prayers as spelled out in the Rule of St. Benedict are as follows: matins or vigils, lauds, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, and compline. See Gerhard Dohrnvan Rossum, History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 35.

  6. Kenneth F. Welch, Time Measurement: An Introductory History (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1924), 17.

  7. Stephen C. McCluskey, Astronomies and Cultures in Early Medieval Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 105–08.

  8. Ibid.

  9. Welch, Time Measurement, 15.

  10. McCluskey, Astronomies and Cultures, 112.

  11. Ibid., 111.

  12. For a discussion of the impact of monastic timekeeping on the creation of modern, capitalist society, see Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963), 12–17.

  13. McCluskey, Astronomies and Cultures, 85.

  14. G. R. Evans, Fifty Key Medieval Thinkers (London: Routledge, 2002), 42.

  15. McCluskey, Astronomies and Cultures, 115.

  16. David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 660 B.C. to A.D. 1450(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 39.

  17. Notker the Stammerer, Notatio, quoted in Michael Idomir Allen, “Bede and Frechulf at Medieval St Gallen,” in Beda Venerabilis: Historian, Monk & Northumbrian, ed. L. A. J. R. Houwen and A. A. MacDonald (Groningen: E. Forsten, 1996), 65.

  18. Charles Burnett, The Introduction of Arabic Learning into England (London: British Library, 1997), 17.

  19. Cochrane, Adelard of Bath, 5–6.

  20. Burnett, Introduction of Arabic Learning, 13.

  21. Ibid., 13–17.

  22. Ibid., 3.

  23. Donald R. Hill, Studies in Medieval Islamic Technology (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998), 22.

  24. Burnett, Introduction of Arabic Learning, 12–13.

  25. Gerbert d’Aurillac, The Letters of Gerbert, with His Papal Privileges as Sylvester II, trans. and ed. Harriet Pratt Lattin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 37.

  26. Emilie Savage-Smith, “Celestial Mapping,” in The History of Cartography, vol. 2, bk. I, Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies, ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 24–25.

  27. School of Gerbert, De utilitatibus astrolabii, quoted in McCluskey, Astronomies and Cultures, 165. As McCluskey points out, this work has been attributed variously to Gerbert and to one of his students, among several others.

  28. Bruce Dickey, “Adelard of Bath: An Examination Based on Heretofore Unexamined Manuscripts” (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1982), 25.

  29. Fulbert of Chartres, The Letters and Poems of Fulbert of Chartres, trans. and ed. Frederick Behrends (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 261. See also McCluskey, Astronomies and Cultures, 177, n. 34. On the earliest use of Arabic words, see Burnett, Introduction of Arabic Learning, 5.

  30. McCluskey, Astronomies and Cultures, 177.

  31. Cochrane, Adelard of Bath, 6.

  32. William of Malmesbury, History of the Kings of England, trans. John Sharpe (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1815), 199.

  33. Quoted in Burnett, Introduction of Arabic Learning, 16.

  34. Michael Scot, Liber introductorius, quoted in Lynn Thorndike, Michael Scot (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1965), 93–94.

  35. Richard Erdoes, A.D. 1000: Living on the Brink of the Apocalypse (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 90.

  36. McCluskey, Astronomies and Cultures, 177–78.

  37. Cochrane, Adelard of Bath, 3.

  38. Ibid., 3–5.

  39. Adelard of Bath, Burnett, xvii—xviii (see Prologue, n. 4).

  40. Ibid., 71.

  41. Ibid.

  42. Ibid., 73.

  43. Crombie, Augustine to Galileo, 35.

  44. Eugen Weber, Apocalypses: Prophecies, Cults, and Millennial Beliefs Through the Ages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 34–45.

  45. The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. F. J. Sheed (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1942), 247.

  46. Ibid., 247–48.

  47. Thomas of Chobham, MS Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 455, fos. 81–82, quoted in D. L. d’Avray, The Preaching of the Friars: Sermons Diffused from Paris Before 1300 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 232–33.

  48. Debra Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries: Text, Image, Ideology (Ca
mbridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), xvii.

  49. Ibid., 40ff.

  50. Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe (London: Arkana, 1989), 89.

  51. Cosmas Indicopleustes, The Christian Topography, trans. and ed. J. W. McCrindle (London: Haklyut Society, 1887), 6. See also Koestler, Sleepwalker, 93.

  52. Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies, trans. and ed. Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 286.

  53. Ibid.

  54. Koestler, Sleepwalkers, 105.

  55. Ibid., 101–02.

  56. René Girard, The Girard Reader, ed. James G. Williams (New York: Herder and Herder, 2004), 100.

  57. Guillaume de Machaut, Judgment of the King of Navarre, quoted in Girard, Girard Reader, 100.

  58. Samuel K. Cohn Jr., “The Black Death and the Burning of Jews,” Past and Present, 196 (2007): 8–9.

  59. Erdoes, A.D. 1000, 1–7.

  60. Ibid., 8.

  61. Cochrane, Adelard of Bath, 11.

  62. Ibid., 11–12.

  63. Crombie, Augustine to Galileo, 33–34.

  64. For a discussion of what he calls medieval “double-think,” see Koestler, Sleepwalkers, 97–106.

  65. The Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. J. A. Giles (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1847), 291.

  66. Maxime Rodinson, Europe and the Mystique of Islam, trans. Roger Veinus (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1987), 4.

  67. David R. Blanks, “Islam and the West in the Age of the Pilgrim,” in The Year 1000: Religious and Social Response to the Turning of the First Millennium, ed. Michael Frassetto (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 259.

  68. Ibid., 260–61.

  69. Rodinson, Europe and the Mystique, 7.

  70. Norman Daniel, “Crusade Propaganda,” in A History of the Crusades, vol. 6, The Impact of the Crusades on Europe, ed. Harry W. Hazard and Norman P. Zacour (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 54–55.

  71. Allison Drew, “The De Eodem et Diverso,” in Adelard of Bath: An English Scientist and Arabist of the Early Twelfth Century, ed. Charles Burnett (London: Warburg Institute, 1987), 17–23.

  72. Adelard of Bath, Burnett, 91.

  Chapter 3: The House of Wisdom

  1. Ibn al-Nadim, The Fihrist of al~Nadim, trans. and ed. Bayard Dodge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 650.

  2. Pier Giovanni Donini, Arab Travelers and Geographers (London: Immel, 1991), 21.

  3. Al-Yaqubi, Le Pays, trans. Gaston Wiet (Cairo: L’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1937), 10.

  4. Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco~Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early Abbasid Society (London: Routledge, 1998), 19.

  5. Ibid., 13–14.

  6. Atiya, Crusade, 209 (see Prologue, n. 8).

  7. Jonathan Bloom, Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 48–51. On the city’s first paper factory, see Gaston Wiet, Baghdad: Metropolis of the Abbasid Caliphate, trans. Seymour Feiler (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), 70.

  8. Johannes Pedersen, The Arabic Book, trans. Geoffrey French (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 116–17.

  9. Ibid., 115–16.

  10. Ruth S. Mackensen, “Four Great Libraries of Medieval Baghdad,” Library Quarterly 2(1932): 280.

  11. Pedersen, Arabic Book, 52.

  12. Saleh Ahmad El-Ali, “The Foundation of Baghdad,” in The Islamic City, ed. A. H. Hourani and S. M. Stern (Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1970), 89–90.

  13. Guy Le Strange, Baghdad During the Abbasid Caliphate (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), 17.

  14. El-Ali, “Foundation of Baghdad,” 93–94.

  15. Ibid., 94.

  16. Sayyid Maqbal Ahmad, A History of Arab-Islamic Geography (Amman: Al al-Bayt University, 1995), 25.

  17. Michael Cooperson, Al Ma’mun (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005), 19–21.

  18. Al-Yaqubi, Le Pays, 4.

  19. Ibid., 5–6.

  20. Quoted in El-Ali, “Foundation of Baghdad,” 96–97.

  21. Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, 33–46.

  22. Ibid., 43.

  23. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. and ed. Franz Rosenthal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 3: 113–14.

  24. Said al-Andalusi, Science in the Medieval World: “Book of the Categories of Nations,” trans. and ed. Semaan I. Salem and Alok Kumar (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 44.

  25. Al-Masudi, The Meadows of Gold, trans. and ed. Paul Lunde and Caroline Stone (London: Kegan Paul, 1989), 388.

  26. Aydin Sayili, The Observatory in Islam (Ankara: Turk Tarih Kurumu Basimevi, 1960), 53.

  27. Hunayn ibn Ishaq, Risalat, quoted in Max Meyerhof, “New Light on Hunain ibn Ishaq and His Period,” Isis8, no. 4 (1926): 690.

  28. Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, 2.

  29. For a detailed discussion of the profound and lasting impact of this competition, see Saliba, Islamic Science, 27–72 (see Prologue, n. 12).

  30. Pedersen, Arabic Book, 21–22.

  31. Al-Biruni, The Determination of the Coordinates of Cities: Al~Biruni’s Tahid al-Amakin, trans. and ed. Jamil Ali (Beirut: Centennial Publications, 1967), 191.

  32. Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, 137.

  33. J. H. Kramers, “The Language of the Koran,” in Analecta Orientalia, vol. 2 (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1954), 164–65.

  34. Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, 65–69.

  35. Pedersen, Arabic Book, 28.

  36. Al-Masudi, quoted in Cooperson, Al Ma’mun, 22.

  37. Ibn al-Nadim, Fihrist of al-Nadim, 254.

  38. Abu Qurra, quoted in Mark N. Swanson, “The Christian al-Mamun Tradition,” in Christians at the Heart of Islamic Rule, ed. David Thomas (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 2003), 67.

  39. Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, 108–09.

  40. Lynn Thorndike, “The True Place of Astrology in the History of Science,” Isis 46, no. 145 (1955): 277.

  41. Abu-Sahl, Kitab an-Nahmutan, quoted in Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, 46.

  42. Cooperson, Al Ma’mun, I—4 and 111–12.

  43. Sayili, Observatory in Islam, 4–7.

  44. Habash al-Hasib, quoted in David A. King, “Too Many Cooks … A Newly-Rediscovered Account of the First Islamic Geodetic Measurements,” Suhayl—Journal for the History of the Exact and Natural Sciences in Islamic Civilisation 1 (2000): 217.

  45. Al-Biruni, Determination of the Coordinates, 183.

  46. Bernard R. Goldstein, “The Making of Astronomy in Early Islam,” Nuncius: Annali di Storia Delia Scienza 1 (1986): 87.

  47. Habash al-Hasib, quoted in Sayili, Observatory in Islam, 56–57.

  48. Sayili, Observatory in Islam, 57.

  49. Arin was the Arab designation, apparently based on a faulty transliteration of Hindu texts. It is associated with the Indian city of Ujjain, in Madhya Pradesh state.

  50. Ibn al-Muthanna”s Commentary on the Astronomical Tables of al~Khwarizmi, trans. and ed. Bernard R. Goldstein (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967), 3–4.

  51. D. A. King and J. Samso, “Astronomical Handbooks and Tables from the Islamic World (750–1900): An Interim Report,” Suhayl—Journal for the History of the Exact and Natural Sciences in Islamic Civilisation 2(2001): 31.

  52. David Eugene Smith and Louis Charles Karpinski, The Hindu-Arabic Numerals (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1911), 6.

  53. Georges Ifrah, The Universal History of Numbers: From Prehistory to the Invention of the Computer, trans. David Bellos, E. F. Harding, Sophie Wood, and Ian Monk (New York: John Wiley, 2000), 529.

  54. Owen Gingerich, “Islamic Astronomy,” Scientific American 254 (April 1986): 70A.

  55. Ibn al-Muthanna, Goldstein, 4.

  56. Ibn al-Nadi
m, Fihrist of al-Nadim, 625.

  57. King and Samsó, “Astronomical Handbooks and Tables,” 14.

  58. Bernard R. Goldstein and David Pingree, “The Astronomical Tables of al-Khwarizmi in a 19th Century Egyptian Text,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 98, no. 1 (1978): 96–99.

  59. Smith and Karpinski, Hindu-Arabic Numerals, 92.

  60. Al-Khwarizmi, Kitab al jam wa’l tafriq bi hisab al hind, quoted in Ifrah, Universal History of Numbers, 364–65.

  61. J. J. Berggren, Episodes in the Mathematics of Medieval Islam (New York: Springer-Verlag, 2003), 7.

  62. Al-Khwarizmi, The Algebra of Mohammad ben Musa, trans. and ed. Frederic Rosen (Hildesheim, Germany: George Olms Verlag, 1986), 3.

  63. Berggren, Episodes in the Mathematics, 63–64.

  64. Ibid., 7.

  65. Roshdi Rashed, The Development of Arabic Mathematics: Between Arithmetic and Algebra, trans. A. F. W. Armstrong (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994), 14.

  66. O. Neugebauer, “The Astronomical Tables of Al-Khwarizmi,” Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskaber Historisk-Filosofiske Skrifter 4, no. 2(1962): 46.

  67. Ibid., 23.

  68. James Evans, The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 23–34.

  69. Goldstein, “The Making of Astronomy,” 86–87.

  70. Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, 75–85.

  71. Ibid., 88.

  72. Al-Masudi, Muruj al~dahab, quoted in Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, 89.

  73. Ibn al-Nadim, Fihrist of al~Nadim, 583–84.

  Chapter 4: Mapping the World

  1. Translations from the Koran are from Marmaduke Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran: An Explanatory Translation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1909). Pickthall’s somewhat archaic use of English has on occasion been modernized.

  2. J. H. Kramers, Analecta Orientalia: Posthumous Writings and Selected Minor Works (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1954), vol. 2, 235–38.

  3. Alfred T. Welch, “Muhammad: Life of the Prophet,” Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), vol. 3, 159.

  4. W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at Medina (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), 195.

  5. Ibid., 198–201.

  6. Watt, Muhammad at Medina, 205.

  7. Ibid., 202.

  8. Ibn Yunis, from a prose translation of a poem in David A. King, In Synchrony with the Heavens: Studies in Astronomical Timekeeping and Instrumentation in Medieval Islamic Civilization (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 2004), 215. King notes that the poem has been attributed to both Ibn Yunis and the famous legal scholar al-Shafi, but he prefers the former based on an analysis of its contents.