by Robert Irwin
Though enthusiastic about ancient Hebrew wisdom, Pico’s attitude to Arabic learning was ambivalent and, despite his studies in Oriental languages, he was hostile to the Arabphilosophers: ‘Leave to us in Heaven’s name Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, and keep your Omar, your Alchibitius, your Abenzoar, your Abenragel.’ He also denounced Arabic poetry (though, like Petrarch, he seems to have avoided reading any). Yet, for all Pico’s professed contempt for Arablearning, he opened his famous Oration on the Dignity of Man (c. 1486) by referring to his reading of ‘the records of the Arabians’ and quoting a certain ‘Abdala the Saracen’ who, when asked what was the most wonderful thing in the world, replied: ‘There is nothing to be seen more wonderful than man.’ Although the declamation that followed was mostly supported by quotations from classical Latin authors and appeals to the authority of the ancient Hebrews and the Zoroastrians, Pico also had words of praise for the Arabthinkers: Averroes, Avempace (more correctly, Ibn Bajja), al-Farabi, Avicenna and al-Kindi. Similarly, in his hardly less well-known treatise against astrology, he cited Avicenna and Averroes. (Even if one despised Arabic learning, it was still desirable to appeal to its authority.) Incidentally, it is worth noting that Pico did not attack astrology from the point of view of a modern rationalist but rather as a defender of another branch of occultism, known as natural magic. Pico died young and in the long run his preoccupations and style of thinking influenced only a handful of eccentric intellectuals. In his own lifetime, several of his cabalistic theses were condemned as heretical by the Church and many of the Hermetic texts whose antiquity Pico had placed his faith in, were subsequently shown to be forgeries of late antiquity.13
Pico and his contemporaries were fascinated by what little they knew about ancient Egypt. In the fifteenth century Egypt was thought of as the source of most of what later came to be identified as Greek culture – a theory that has been quite recently revived and vigorously and controversially argued by Martin Bernal.14 Renaissance Platonists, such as Marsilio Ficino, believed that Egyptian hieroglyphs represented Platonic ideas about the universe and divine things. The Egyptian priesthood used the esoteric hieroglyphs to conceal divine mysteries from the profane.15 It was Ficino who in 1471 translated the Corpus Hermeticum from Greek into Latin. This was a body of Platonist and occult writings attributed to an ancient and semi-divine sage Hermes Trismegistus, who in some of his aspects can be considered as a classicized version of the Egyptian god, Thoth. Pico naively believed in the literal existence of this figure and in what seemed to be cryptic prophecies of the coming of Christ by Hermes Trismegistus.16 As we shall see, early in the next century Isaac Casaubon was to demonstrate that Pico’s faith in the authenticity and antiquity of the Hermetic writings was misplaced. In the seventeenth century, that fascinating thinker Athanasius Kircher (on whom, see the next chapter) would make a more determined assault on the mysteries of the hieroglyphs. However, primitive Egyptology, based on false premises and fuelling wild hopes of rediscovering lost ancient wisdom, made even less progress in the centuries that immediately followed than Arabic studies did. Study of the language and culture of the ancient Egyptians became the intellectually marginalized province of dabblers in cabalism, Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry.
THE STRUGGLE FORGLOBAL SUPREMACY
The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were the great age of the Muslim empires: Mughal India, Safavid Persia, Mamluk Egypt and Syria, and Ottoman Turkey. Several European observers warned that Christendom was a shrinking island surrounded by the rising tide of Islam. The fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II in 1453 seemed to threaten Christendom’s very survival. Its capture by the Turks was not only a political and military disaster, but also a cultural disaster for humanist Europe. As Aeneas Sylvius (later Pope Pius II) wrote, it was ‘the second death of Homer and Plato’. The conquest of Constantinople was followed by further Turkish conquests of Greek islands and Balkan territories. In 1521 Suleiman the Magnificent captured Belgrade and then destroyed the Hungarian army at the Battle of Mohacs in 1526and the Turks besieged Hapsburg Vienna for the first time in 1529. A little to the east, the Turks were pushing on into what is nowadays Romania. In the Mediterranean they occupied Rhodes in 1522, Cyprus in 1571and Crete in 1669. Elsewhere in the world, particularly in South East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, Islam continued to make converts and expand its territory. A significant number of those who fought for the Ottomans and who commanded or crewed the ships of the Barbary corsairs were European renegades who had converted from Christianity to Islam. Such cases were widely publicized and denounced from pulpits across Europe.17 Christendom was under siege.
Only in the West had Christian armies made significant gains from Islam. In 1492 what was left of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada surrendered to the Spanish Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella. That same year Columbus set out on his voyage of exploration across the Atlantic. His venture had been inspired by the ideology of the Crusades. He hoped to gain independent trading access to the wealth of the Indies and to outflank the Islamic empires of the Ottomans, Mamluks and Safavids. He believed that he lived very close to the Last Days and he was inspired by knowledge that astrologers had predicted the imminent collapse of Muhammad’s sect and the coming of the Antichrist. Columbus set out his aims in a document addressed to Ferdinand and Isabella: ‘Your Highnesses, as good Christian and Catholic princes, devout and propagators of the Christian faith, as well as enemies of the sect of Mahomet and of all idolatries and heresies, conceived the plan of sending me, Christopher Columbus, to this country of the Indies, there to see the princes, the peoples, the territory, their disposition and all things else, and the way in which one might convert these regions to our holy faith.’18 When Columbus set sail across the Atlantic, he was careful to include in the ship’s complement an Arabic-speaking Jew, for his expectation was that they would reach the East Indies, where there were known to be many Arabic-speaking Muslim traders in the ports of China, Malaysia and India. It must have been somewhat disappointing to discover when he first touched land that the Caribs were quite ignorant of Arabic.
There was at first a reluctance to acknowledge that America really was a new and different continent. Benito Arias Montano, Spanish organizer of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible project, was so convinced that America must have been known to authors of the Bible that he added to the texts of the Antwerp edition a list of the Hebrew forms of American place names that he thought he had discovered in the Bible.19 The Fleming Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the Hapsburg ambassador to Ottoman Istanbul from 1554to 1562, believed that the Christian powers were wasting their time and resources in America, while Christianity’s very survival was threatened by Ottoman advances in Europe and he denounced those who wasted resources in ‘seeking the Indies and the Antipodes across vast fields of ocean, in search of gold’. Some Turkish observers, however, were more perceptive.20 Around 1580an Ottoman geographer, the author of Tarikh al-Hind al-Garbi (‘History of the India of the West’), warned that the European settlements on the coasts of the Americas posed long-term economic dangers to the prosperity and survival of the sultanate.21 True to the crusading spirit of Columbus, when the Spaniards did set about colonizing the Americas, they conducted themselves as if they were fighting a new holy war. The literature of the period frequently compared the barbarous, pagan American Indians to the Muslims and both were regularly accused by Christian writers of idolatry, sodomy and indolence.22
THE RISE OF TRAVEL LITERATURE
The discovery of America also fostered a renewed enthusiasm for travel literature. Curiously, however, people were far more interested in reading about the Islamic lands and the lands yet further east than they were in reading about the New World. Giambattista Ramusio published an extremely popular collection of travel narratives, Racolta de Navigazioni et viaggi (Venice, 1550–59), and it was chiefly through Ramusio’s collection that Marco Polo’s account of his journey to the Great Khan became better known. In the 1580s and 1590s Richard Hakluyt publis
hed a series of narratives of exploration, mostly concerning voyages to the Americas. Then, in 1613, Samuel Purchas published an English equivalent to Ramusio’s anthology, Purchas his Pilgrimage, or Relations of the World and the Religions observed in all the Ages, and in 1625he followed this up with two further books which collected together travellers’ accounts of all parts of the then known world. Purchas was a fervent partisan for Mandeville’s travel writings. The account given by Purchas of Xanadu was to inspire Coleridge’s famous poem. As the title of Purchas’s collection suggests, he conceived of travelling as a kind of act of piety.23
Pilgrimage to the Holy Land was still very popular in the last decades of the fifteenth century and a copious and repetitive literature of pilgrimage was produced in that period. Thereafter the fashion for actually going on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, as opposed to reading about it, declined steeply. Even so, those who travelled in the East often modelled their narratives on the precedents provided by literary pilgrims, as did, for example, Jean Thenaud who accompanied the French ambassador to the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt, Qansuh al-Ghuri, in 1512.24 Pierre Belon was another literary traveller who went out in the entourage of a French ambassador, though he went to Istanbul in the 1540s. Belon was a naturalist who investigated the zoology and botany of Turkey, Egypt and Syria and the results of those researches appeared in Les observations de plusieurs singularitez et choses memorables trouvées en Grece, Asie, Iudée, Égypte Arabie et autres pays estranges (1554). Belon, who was also responsible for introducing hitherto unknown Middle Eastern plants to France, was murdered in 1564, possibly by a Huguenot.25 Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq (1522–92), the Hapsburg ambassador in Constantinople who feared that the Turks were making gains in Europe while the Christian powers squandered their resources in America, has already been mentioned. Like many diplomats in the early modern period, Busbecq also pursued a wide range of scholarly interests, as a linguist, antiquarian, zoologist and botanist. When he returned to Europe he brought with him 264 Greek manuscripts, as well as a considerable collection of Greek and Roman coins and six female camels. His letters from Turkey to a friend, initially published in Latin as the Itinera Constantinopolitanum et Amasium. Eiusdem…de acie contra Turcam instruenda consilium (1581), gave a portrait of Turkish life that is infused with a classicist’s sensibility and quotations from Pliny, Polybius, Galen and Plautus.26
Though Nicolas de Nicolay (1517–83) can be variously described as a soldier, spy or cartographer, he was effectively a professional travel writer who travelled throughout Europe, North Africa and Turkey and then wrote about his experiences, most notably in Les quatre premiers livres des navigations et peregrinations orientales (1567). Nicolay’s book was illustrated with the exotic costumes of the East and was presumably much consulted by European painters of Eastern themes as well as by people who had been invited to fancy-dress parties.27 However, the number of travellers who went out to the Near East and then wrote about their experience in the sixteenth century was a mere trickle compared to what it would become in the seventeenth century. As merchants, pilgrims and scholar adventurers brought exotic objects of all kinds back to Europe – American Indian drums, unusual seashells, Persian ceramics, hitherto unknown herbs, stuffed mermen, Chinese ivories, Indian money, narwhal horns and so on – private collectors set up cabinets of curiosity that were unsystematic collections of the rare and the marvellous. The cabinet of curiosity, a primitive and often fanciful attempt to organize the flood of new knowledge coming from exotic parts, besides being the ancestor of the museum, was also one of the institutional precursors of serious Orientalism.28
Apart from travellers’ narratives of the exotic parts, European scholars also learned a great deal from native informants. Leo Africanus was easily the most important of these informants in the sixteenth century. Leo, whose original name was Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan, was an Arab, born in Granada in 1493 or 1494. His family migrated to Fez in Morocco when he was young. Hasan received a good education and as a young man he served on various North African diplomatic missions, so that he came to know parts of Africa, including Egypt, quite well. In 1518 he was captured by corsairs close to Jerba, an island off the Tunisian coast, and brought to Rome. There he learned Italian. The Medici Pope Leo X became his patron and therefore, when Hasan converted in 1520, he took Leo as his Christian name. Leo Africanus studied the Latin historians. He wrote a great deal, most of which has not survived, and, among other things, he provided biographies of famous learned Arabs for use by European scholars. Leo also had links with the Christian cabalists and he introduced Guillaume Postel to the za‘irja, a strange kind of North African divination machine, consisting of concentric rotating wheels inscribed with letters, which could be made to answer questions about unseen things. He also provided crucial information about which Arabic works were important and this was to guide generations of future manuscript hunters in their search for Arabic works. It was from Leo, for example, that the West learned about the importance of al-Hariri’s twelfth-century classic literary jeu d’esprit, the Maqamat, as well as the philosopher-historian Ibn Khaldun’s theoretical prolegomena to the study of history, the Muqaddima. However, Leo’s chief work was The History and Description of Africa and the Notable Things Therein Contained. He wrote this in (poor) Italian and finished the manuscript in 1526. The Description is mostly about Africa north of the Sahara and the section on Leo’s home town, Fez, is especially detailed. Leo drew heavily on his own observations as a travelling ambassador, but he also took a great deal from the poet Ibn al-Raqiq al-Qayrawani’s lost history of North Africa and he cited classic works by authors like al-Mas‘udi, al-Idrisi and Ibn Khaldun. Ramusio published the Description in 1550 and it was later translated into Latin, French and English (the last by John Pory). Some time before 1550 Leo slipped away back to North Africa and, home once more, he presumably resumed his Muslim identity.29
In general, Christian attempts to evangelize among the Muslims of the Near East and North Africa had no success and in the sixteenth century it was more a matter of writing treatises for the hypothetical use of missionaries than of sending preachers out into the infidel fields. Moreover, some of those who wrote books about Islam or Oriental languages, though they suggested that such studies might be useful in the furtherance of missionary activities, seem to have been using that claim as a pretext to justify their more purely intellectual interest in the exotic. The declaration in the preface to a treatise on, say, the Arabic language, that it had some exalted Christian purpose, might well be successful in securing patronage and a financial subsidy from some senior ecclesiastical dignitary. It is also useful to remember that Catholic and Protestant missions were not necessarily directed towards the Muslims. Quite often the proposed aim was to bring the Eastern Christian Arabs, Greeks and Copts into the Catholic or Protestant fold. In particular, Catholics and Lutherans competed with each other to reach an ecumenical understanding with the Greek Orthodox Christians who were now subjects of the Ottoman Sultan. The only Eastern Church that was in communion with Rome was the Maronite Church. Lebanese Maronites in Italy, under the patronage of the Pope and the Republic of Venice, were instrumental in fostering the study of Syriac, and Maronites also provided the Vatican library with Arabic manuscripts.30 In addition to attempts to correct the ways of the Eastern Christians (as missionary-minded folk in the West saw the matter), for centuries to come other Christian missionaries worked on the conversion of the Jews, for many believed that the total conversion of the Jews was a necessary precondition for the end of the world. (This was a period when the pious actually looked forward to the end of the world with some enthusiasm.)
THE CRAZY FATHER OF ORIENTALISM: GUILLAUME POSTEL
Though Guillaume Postel was in some senses a wholly exceptional figure, in many ways he was entirely a product of his times. Like Thenaud, Busbecq and Belon, Postel took scholarly advantage of French diplomatic missions in the Near East; he was a writer who produced both scholarly treatises for those who were versed i
n Latin and Hebrew, as well as accounts of Turkish and Muslim manners and customs that were written in the vernacular and aimed at a wider French readership; the intellectual heir of Pico’s Christian cabalism and of Nicholas of Cusa’s strivings for concord between the world’s great faiths; and an advocate of preaching missions to the Muslims.
That Guillaume Postel – the first true Orientalist – was also a complete lunatic may be taken as an ominous presage for the future history of an intellectual discipline. Born in 1510, he was an orphan and child prodigy, who first supported himself by working as a servant in a school at Beaucé, where he allegedly taught himself Hebrew. He subsequently found inspiration in his reading of Pico della Mirandola on the cabalistic version of Christianity and he followed Pico in believing that the occult doctrines of the Cabala could be used to demonstrate the truths of Christianity and therefore the study of Hebrew and mastery of the Cabala could be of great use to missionaries, as they could use this occult lore to demonstrate the irrefutable truths of Christianity. However, Postel’s mastery of the Jewish sources was far greater than Pico’s. Postel translated a large part of the cabalistic text, the Zohar, into Latin. He was also one of the grand figures in research on the primordial language, the Ursprache. In his De originibus seu de Hebraicae linguae et gentis antiquitate (1538), he argued that Hebrew was the primordial language and from it descended, not only Arabic and Chaldaean but also Hindi and Greek – and all other tongues. His belief in the primacy of Hebrew was not in his time particularly controversial. What was a little eccentric was his idea that in order to achieve world peace and a utopian manner of life it was necessary for everyone to return to speaking Hebrew, for it was the via veritas perdita, ‘the lost way of truth’. Moreover, he held that the very structure of the Hebrew language, divinely ordained as it was, would confirm the Christian revelation. Given the extraordinary status he assigned to Hebrew studies, his interest in other languages was inevitably subsidiary to those studies. However, his knowledge of Greek was also excellent and he wrote a pioneering study of Athenian institutions.
