The Friar and the Cipher

by Lawrence Goldstone

  Then, when Frederick was eighteen, as a buffer against the ambitions of a would-be emperor, a hulking dimwit named Otto the Welf, Innocent, convinced of his own infallibility, granted the boy his birthright and declared him Holy Roman Emperor and ruler of Sicily.

  Underestimating this blond, handsome teenager was to be the greatest blunder of Innocent's career. Frederick would grow into a scholar, warrior, poet, freethinker, mathematician, and scientist, and nearly achieve his grandfather's ambition to conquer Rome itself. He would come to personify secular power and thought, questioning the fundamental tenets of scripture and the rules by which medieval Europe lived. More important, Frederick, later referred to as “the Antichrist” by future popes, would provide a focal point for the scientific revolution in which Roger Bacon participated so significantly and come within a whisper of creating sufficient momentum for it to overpower a thousand years of Christian dogma.

  The new emperor Frederick II quickly threw off the papal yoke and used Sicily's fabulous wealth to create the most flamboyant court in all Europe. He himself became known as Stupor Mundi, the wonder of the world. He traveled with a menagerie of exotic animals and birds, including leopards, panthers, bears, peacocks, doves, ostriches, a giraffe on a chain, and an elephant with a small tower on its back. He had slaves in silk, wagons of treasure, a variety of bric-a-brac rendered in gold and precious jewels. He had a harem and an army of Saracen slaves. For dinner he ate figs, dates, and nuts, all unknown to the northern palate. Northern European visitors were stunned by the opulence and Byzantine grandeur of his court. He might have been the emperor of Christendom, but he looked like the Sultan of Baghdad.

  This appearance was no coincidence, because in his heart he was much more Arab than Hohenstaufen. Perhaps because he was the only Christian ruler with a firsthand knowledge of the Arab Empire, the only one to have actually met one of his Arabian counterparts, the only one to exchange letters and gifts, he was also the only one to really appreciate how advanced Arab civilization had become—to dare to think it more advanced than Christendom.

  Frederick was personally the most educated monarch in Europe. He was conversant in at least seven languages and could read three or four. He devoured classics that had been translated in the previous century, and his knowledge of mathematics was superior to that of almost any scholar in Europe. He sent such complicated geometry problems to the sultan of Damascus that the sultan was forced to pass them on to his most advanced Egyptian mathematicians for solution. Another sultan, noting the emperor's interest in science, sent Frederick the gift of an astrolabe, used for measuring the altitude of the sun and the stars. Frederick was the only ruler in Europe to write his own book, called On the Art of Hunting with Birds. In it, he carefully detailed precise observations of different species and their habits, including migratory patterns. He once had a vulture's eyes sewn shut to test whether the birds hunted by sight or by smell.

  He was so consumed by the new learning that in 1224 he established his own university at Naples on the Italian mainland and actively recruited scholars, poets, painters, and scientific thinkers to his court for the purpose of translating and studying scientific works. One of these, an English astrologer, would be as responsible as anyone in history for bringing the blessing and curse of Aristotle to Europe.

  Michael Scot had been a translator in Toledo before relocating to Frederick's court. He was equal parts scientist, philosopher, and quack. Frederick was so impressed with Michael's knowledge of Arab scholarship that he appointed him court astrologer and general all-around sage. With the emperor's encouragement, Michael Scot practiced alchemy and conducted experiments, detailing his observations in a scientific manner. *1

  Michael Scot's most important contribution, however, was his translation into Latin from Arabic of Aristotle's works on natural science, the libri naturales, such treatises as On the Parts of Animals, On the Generation of Animals, and the Physics. He also translated more provocative texts—the Metaphysics, On the Heavens, and Ethics. More than that, he included his own translations of the commentaries of Avicenna and Averroës.

  These were just the sort of secular subjects that Frederick held dear and Rome feared. Michael's translations made their way to Paris, and would be the very translations later used by Albertus Magnus and Bacon himself to propound their views on experimental science. “Although only some of his works on logic and certain others have been translated from Greek by Boethius, yet from the time of Michael Scotus, whose translations with authentic expositions of certain parts of Aristotle's works on nature and metaphysics appeared in the year of our Lord 1230, the philosophy of Aristotle has grown in importance among the Latins,” Roger Bacon was to write later.

  The combination of Michael Scot's translations and the commentaries of Averroës shook Christian orthodoxy. There were indeed some passages in this new Aristotle that called into question not only the old, accepted, logical Aristotle but also some fundamental tenets of the Christian faith. Three elements in particular seemed devastating.

  First, Aristotle said quite specifically in the Metaphysics that the universe was eternal, with no beginning or end, that it had simply “always been.” The Bible, on the other hand, said equally specifically that God had created the heavens and the earth in a finite period by an act of will. Second, Aristotle claimed that after death an individual's soul blended into what he called “the tenth intelligence,” a kind of generalized soul that was surprisingly reminiscent of the discredited Plotinus. This was taken (correctly) to mean that Aristotle denied the immortality of the individual soul as Christians recognized it, which therefore rendered the concepts of heaven and hell meaningless. Without the promise of heaven—or the fear of hell—the authority of the Church to create and enforce standards of behavior would erode considerably.

  The big one, however, the problem that seemed utterly irreconcilable with the Christian faith, was the Aristotelian division (as interpreted by Averroës) of truth into two distinct forms—that which could be known by reason (philosophy) and that which must be accepted by faith (religion). While the division of reason and faith was not in itself repugnant to Christians—it had, after all, been a cornerstone of St. Augustine's work—faith being subordinate to reason, consigned as the lesser truth (as Aristotle seemed to have clearly stated), was anathema. If philosophy was to represent the highest level of knowledge, what would happen to the rule of God and, worse, the rule of God's agents on earth—the pope and his cardinals, bishops, and priests?

  In short, what Aristotle presented in these new translated works, in vastly greater detail and breadth than the old, was a philosophy of science itself, a theory of how to make sense of it all and use the knowledge for human advancement. The man who had given the Church not only its method of learning but also its fundamental truths of nature, such as the geocentric universe and the composition of matter as mixtures of the four basic elements of air, fire, water, and earth, was now saying that the fundamental tenets of Christianity—to say nothing of the Bible—that the very manner in which Christians viewed this world, and the world beyond, were wrong.

  Michael Scot's translations reinforced the already powerful pull toward secular knowledge that had begun with the translated manuscripts from Spain. The new knowledge from the south was proving both irresistible and inexorable in the north, and for the first time large numbers of students from across Europe came to cities such as Paris to study Aristotle rather than the Sentences. That, in turn, led to a radical increase in the number—and influence—of masters who taught only science or the arts and often were not even members of the clergy themselves. Still, control of education had always been a cornerstone of ecclesiastic power, and, since in the past no one outside the clergy had been much interested in schooling, many theologians felt that it would be a simple matter to seize control of the universities.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Dogma, Drink, and Dissent:

  The University of Paris

  • • •


  BY THE TIME ROGER BACON WENT TO SCHOOL IN 1228, about ten universities had been founded across Europe. Of these, the undeniable apex was Paris. Paris had been the beneficiary of a happy combination of convenient geography, a pleasant climate, status as a capital city, and an enthusiastic, devout line of kings. “The Italians have the Papacy, the Germans have the Empire, and the French have Learning” went a medieval saying.

  For all this Learning, however, it was necessary to have Students, and students were (and still are) a mixed blessing. By the 1190s, students and masters composed more than a tenth of Paris's total population of about 30,000. As education turned secular, more and more students entered school specifically to gain an undergraduate arts degree and become doctors, lawyers, or clerks. They came from all over Europe, and from every stratum of society. There were noblemen and peasants, French, Germans, Italians, Spanish, English, and everyone in between. The vast majority of this new transient population was between the ages of fourteen and eighteen—and they were all boys.

  Paris very quickly developed into a classic college town. Twenty-first-century parents will be interested to learn that university life has not changed very much in nearly a millennium. The overwhelming preponderance of letters home, for example, were pleas for money. Since many of the fourteen-year-olds who arrived at the school had not yet had the chance to learn to write, there were the equivalent of form letters for the purpose of conniving money out of parents or patrons, with blank spaces for the student's name and his target. “A much copied exercise contained twenty-two different methods of approaching an archdeacon on this ever delicate subject,” observed Charles Haskins in his meticulously researched Studies in Medieval Culture.

  A sample letter, composed by a teacher for the benefit of his students (upon whom he was reliant for his fees), went as follows:

  I know not what to offer you, my sweet father, since I am your son, and after God, entirely your own creature—so completely yours that I can give you nothing. But if I can remember what the child's instinct prompts it to say, I might sing, as the cuckoo incessantly sings, “Da, da, da, da”: and this little song I am compelled to sing at this moment, for the money which you gave me so liberally for my studies last time is now all spent, and I am in debt to the tune of more than five shillings . . .

  Hormones were also a major problem. There was quite a lot of drinking and brawling. The undergraduates fought with themselves, with the townspeople, with the masters, and with their servants. The students were so unruly, in fact, that sometimes the masters were forced to close down the university altogether. There was a great deal of interest in women as well. Since many of the city's landlords refused to rent to students or provide teaching space, classes were held in the seamier sections of town, often over brothels. This made the Paris prostitutes a kind of adjunct faculty.

  A famous thirteenth-century minstrel named Rutebeuf summed up the situation this way:

  THE SONG OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS

  Much argument is heard of late,

  The subject I'll attempt to state,

  The student-folk of Paris town

  (I speak of those in cap and gown,

  Students of art, philosophy—

  In short, “the University,”

  And not our old-time learned men)

  Have stirred up trouble here again.

  To give his son a chance to stay

  In Paris, growing wise each day,

  Is some old peasant's one ambition.

  To pay his bills and his tuition

  The poor hard-working father slaves;

  Sends him each farthing that he saves,

  While he in misery will stay

  On his scant plot of land to pray

  That his hard toil may help to raise

  His son to honor and to praise.

  But once the son is safe in town

  The story then reads upside down.

  Forgetting all his pledges now,

  The earnings of his father's plow

  He spends for weapons, not for books.

  Dawdling through city streets, he looks

  To find some pretty, loitering wench,

  Or idle brawl by tavern bench;

  Wanders at will and prie about

  Till money fails and gown wears out.—

  Then he starts fresh on the old round;

  Why sow good seed on barren ground?

  But swaggering hauberks, as they sit

  Drowning in drink their feeble wit;

  While three or four of them excite

  Four hundred students to a fight,

  And close the University.

  (Not such a great calamity!)

  Why send a boy away to school

  There to become an arrant fool?

  When he should be acquiring sense,

  He wastes his time and all his pence,

  And to his friends brings only shame,

  While they suppose him winning fame. *2

  The animosity between the university and the rest of the city grew steadily until, in 1200, the school won a decisive victory over the citizens of Paris. The incident began when a German student's servant went down to the local pub to purchase some wine for his employer. There was a disagreement over price, and the tavern owner insulted the servant. The servant went back to the German student empty-handed. The student rounded up some of his compatriots and took them to the bar, where they proceeded to trash the establishment and beat up the owner. There was outrage in the city, and the civilian authority, under the command of the royal provost, got up its own mob, went over to the German student's quarters, and in retaliation killed a bunch of university people, including the German student.

  The masters, who understood their growing power in a city that was becoming more and more dependent on the university as an industry, called on the king to act against his own provost. They threatened to close the school and initiate a mass exodus of the faculty if their demands were not met. Philip Augustus was in power, and he ruled without hesitation in favor of the masters. Not only did he throw all of the Parisians involved in the incident, including his own provost, into prison for life, but he seized their lands, burned their houses, and then pursued those who fled from the city across France and brought them back for the same punishment. Just to make sure nobody crossed this line again, Philip Augustus issued a charter giving all scholars clerical status, which meant that they could not be tried in civil courts, nor could their property or persons be seized.

  In the end, though, the primacy of the University of Paris was secured not by the kings of France but by its most powerful alumnus, Innocent III. Innocent, who had seen the potential of the University firsthand, moved quickly to make Paris the vehicle with which to provide Rome with a steady stream of superior theology graduates. In 1209, he issued a charter confirming what amounted to a guild of masters and essentially placed it under papal protection, a policy that would be continued by subsequent popes. From that time on, the University of Paris became the papacy's school, the acme of theological study, and, most important, a prerequisite to high ecclesiastic office.

  Innocent and the theological faculty were in fundamental agreement over what should and should not be taught, but the arts faculty had different ideas. All those brawling, drunken students, who came to the school not to study theology but for degrees in law or medicine gave the arts masters significant clout and helped them grow into a political force. By sheer power of numbers, the arts faculty could now battle on equal terms with the more conservative theology masters. At the time, no one anticipated that this battle would evolve into the philosophical struggle for the soul of Christianity that it was to become, with the arts masters—of whom Roger Bacon would become the most prominent example—championing science and a more intellectually inclusive Church and the theology masters trying to hold back the dual tides of reform and secular knowledge.

  The rift began in earnest in 1210, when Peter of Corbeil, the archbishop of Sens, who had been
Innocent's own theological master at Paris two decades earlier, banned a number of books representing the new learning, among them Aristotle's works on natural philosophy (as science was known through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance) and Avicenna's commentaries. The banned books were not to be “read at Paris in public or secret.” This ban would be reissued periodically, but to no avail. The arts faculty continued to read and debate Aristotle and his commentators. It seemed that even Innocent's great personal power would not be enough to prevent the arts masters from teaching whatever they liked, and thereby undermining his plans for the future of the Church.

  Then, suddenly, fate threw a wild card into the mix. Two new religious orders came into being. Each embraced as its primary goals poverty, charity, and a simple Christlike existence, yet each would nonetheless recruit among its members the best scientific minds of the time and turn them loose on the universities. One of these orders would come to be known for exalting Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, the other for suppressing Roger Bacon. Each order was referred to by the name of its founder—St. Dominic de Guzman and St. Francis of Assisi. The Dominicans and the Franciscans would entirely alter the balance of power both in the universities and in the Church at large and determine the course of science for the next four centuries.