by Waqas Ahmed
Similarities can be drawn with his English counterpart. King Henry VIII is famous for having six wives and founding the English Navy, and notorious for his ground-shattering detachment from the Roman Catholic Church. But he was also a multitalented genius. He used his talents as a jouster and hunter to enhance his athletic royal image and impress foreign emissaries and rulers as well as to convey his ability to suppress rebellions. Moreover, he was an avid gambler and dice player, and an accomplished musician, author and poet; his best-known piece of music is ‘Pastime with Good Company’ (The Kynges Ballade). He was also the first well-educated English king with a well-stocked library, who personally annotated many books and wrote and published his own work.
Ambitious monarchs often had a perpetual passion for learning. The seventeenth-century Queen Kristina of Sweden was one of the most prominent patronesses of arts and scholarship. She was a lifelong student of all knowledge, known to have spent 12 hours a day studying a variety of subjects. She was a polyglot, trained in the art of soldiery, who exchanged letters with Descartes on matters of philosophy (and in fact hired him as a tutor), studied astronomy with Leibniz and set up her own observatory. In India the eleventh-century Paramar king of Malwa, Raja Bhoja, is recognised by historians as a great statesman and military genius, who also wrote various treatises on subjects ranging from theology, poetry and grammar to engineering, architecture and chemistry.
These polymaths were monarchs, but the same principle applies to some exceptional modern ‘democratic’ leaders. Thomas Jefferson is often revered as one of the greatest statesmen of all time. His early political career saw him as a congressman, diplomat (Minister to France), and Secretary of State. After co-founding the Democratic Republican Party, he went on to become the third President of the United States. Most famously, as one of the Founding Fathers, he was principal author of the Declaration of Independence. But his multifarious accomplishments outside politics are what makes him stand out from the remaining 40-odd American presidents. So much so that at a dinner hosting various Nobel laureates at the White House, John F. Kennedy famously joked: ‘I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together in the White House — with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.’
In addition to being a reputed lawyer, Jefferson was a farmer with an enduring interest in agricultural techniques, an accomplished architect who helped popularise Palladianism, a prolific inventor whose designs include a revolving book stand and the ‘Great Clock,’ a polyglot who spoke five languages fluently and an intellectual who corresponded with some of the leading thinkers of his time.
Did Jefferson’s many-sidedness contribute to his ability as a statesman? According to Azeri intellectual Hamlet Isakhanli, ‘a multifaceted person has a greater chance of being a leader and of achieving success in leadership.’ Management psychologist Philip Tetlock concludes from his research that there is an inverse relationship between the best scientific indicators of good judgement and single-minded specialisation. Drawing from Isaiah Berlin’s ‘fox and the hedgehog’ analogy, he contends that the fox — the thinker who knows many little things, draws from an eclectic array of traditions, and is better able to improvise in response to changing events — is more successful in predicting the future than the hedgehog, who knows one big thing, toils devotedly within one tradition and imposes formulaic solutions on ill-defined problems.
Commenting on Tetlock’s thesis, Oxford neuroscientist Anders Sandberg reaffirmed, ‘the manager solves manageable problems, a leader solves unknown problems. The leader probably has to be a kind of polymath. I would be very worried about a hedgehog leader.’ Indeed, one of the world’s leading futurists Ray Kurzweil insists on the need for the leader in any project to be polymathic. ‘Experts in highly specialized fields can be part of a team,’ he admits, ‘but the team leader needs to bridge multiple disciplines.’
This may also explain the success of Winston Churchill, celebrated as one of the twentieth century’s greatest statesmen. He held a diverse range of high-level government positions including First Lord of the Admiralty, Chancellor of the Exchequer, President of the Board of Trade and Home Secretary, before ultimately becoming one of the most celebrated prime ministers in British history.
Churchill’s accomplishments as a leader are so revered that they have often overshadowed the fact that he was also an accomplished soldier, artist and scholar — a ‘many-sided genius’ according to his Queen. He was also a prolific writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953; he wrote a novel, two historical biographies, three volumes of memoirs, several histories and numerous newspaper articles as a war correspondent. As an oil painter he produced over 100 works, mostly impressionist landscapes, which have been exhibited worldwide — he even wrote a treatise on painting. Philosopher Roger Scruton — himself a polymathic intellectual — puts Churchill’s greatness in leadership down to the fact that he was a polymath: .’ . . I think here of Churchill, with his grasp of history, literature, art, the ways of society and the law — all of which helped him to have the imaginative and total grasp of the situation in the 1930s when the rest of the political class was stumbling in the dark.’
There are other examples, too. America’s 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt, excelled at judo and boxing and then did stints as a policeman, soldier, explorer, farmer and hunter before taking public office at the age of 42 and ultimately becoming one of America’s greatest ever leaders. Later recognised as the ultimate scholar-statesman, he became one of the most published writers of all American presidents with books on subjects as diverse as history (naval history as well as his monumental Winning of the West), nature and travel literature (tales from his Brazilian and African adventures) and philosophy.
Ranked as one of the ‘Greatest South Africans of all time,’ Jan Smuts is hailed as one the twentieth century’s great statesmen. He held various cabinet posts in the British government, and then went on to become the Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa from 1919 until 1924 and from 1939 until 1948. He was the only person to sign the peace treaties ending both the First and Second World Wars. On the multilateral level, he was also an important architect of the League of Nations and its successor, the United Nations, eventually becoming the only person to sign the charters of both organisations. His success as a leader might have had something to do with the fact that he had an extremely diverse career. He was also — at various points in his life — a lawyer, journalist, soldier, philosopher and botanist.
King-makers
One of the key figures of what became known as the Weimar Romanticism movement, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, is believed to be one of the all-time greats in world literature. But in addition to his hugely popular novels, plays and poems, he also made significant advances in the scientific disciplines of biology, botany and physics, while also having been a successful lawyer, courtier and philosopher. Goethe began his career as a draughtsman and watercolourist, also nurturing a strong interest in theatre and literature. He enrolled to study law in Leipzig, eventually becoming certified as a licensee in Frankfurt and working on a number of important cases. He then became an adviser at the court of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, where he held many positions including that of a military adviser during the failed invasion of France and the Siege of Mainz.
Throughout this time as a lawyer, and then at court, Goethe pursued his passion for literature, producing hugely popular novels, poems and plays. His poetry — including Willkommen und Abscheid, Sesenheimer Lieder, Heideroslein and Mignon’s Song — was set to music by almost every major Austrian and German composer from Mozart to Mahler. His style served as a model of a movement in German poetry termed Innerlichkeit (Introversion). His novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers), a romantic tragedy, became a bestseller and paved the way for the early phase of Romanticism. As a playwright, Goethe enjoyed enormous success, particularly after his 1808 ep
ic closet drama Faust Part One — a tragic play in which the main protagonist Faust sells his soul to the devil for power over the physical world. The philosophical, psychological and political implications of the play had a profound impact on the German people, and it soon became recognised as one of the greatest feats in German literature. Faust Part Two was only finished in the year of his death, and was published posthumously.
It was Goethe’s outstanding work in the sciences, however, that cements his legend as a polymathic genius. His first major scientific contribution was in biology. Through extensive research, Goethe made observations about the continuous metamorphosis of living things, particularly plants. This branch of biology would later be called homology, and would be used over a century later by Charles Darwin in compiling his theory of evolution. Goethe then turned his attention to theoretical physics, publishing his Theory of Colours in 1810, in which he proposed that colour arises from the dynamic interplay of light, darkness and turbidity. This is considered by many — and indeed by Goethe himself — as being his most important work, above and beyond even his work in literature. He also took a keen interest in mineralogy, and the mineral goethite (iron oxide) is named after him. Goethe was also a prominent philosopher. His philosophy derived from his work in both literature and the sciences, and was greatly influenced by his intellectual friendship with Wilhelm Schiller. He became a pioneer of German Romanticism.
King-makers in this context were not necessarily royal advisers who sought to secure succession for their prince, but more generally courtiers who upheld the glory of their ruler by assisting in a multitude of ways depending on their talents and abilities. They were often intellectuals and artists who acted as multipurpose advisers, administrators and entertainers at the royal courts. They produced great artistic, scientific and philosophical works in their own right, but in doing so they were also contributing to the legitimacy, sustainability and overall potency of their respective monarchies.
The all-round brilliance of these king-makers was either a recognised attribute, consciously favoured and supported by the patron, or was fortuitously unleashed through the commissioning of various projects relating to different fields, simply because the patron had faith in the individual. There was no compulsion to identify one single niche in a person; a talented person was boundlessly, even endlessly talented. Not only did a vibrant and flamboyant court attract polymaths, but it also created an atmosphere that actively fostered and encouraged polymathy as an approach to work and lifestyle.
Ban Zhao, teacher to the Empress Den Sui of the Han Dynasty and court librarian, was one of the world’s first recorded female polymaths (at least in the intellectual, professional sense). Her oeuvre included history, philosophy, poetry, astronomy, travel literature and genealogy. Her most celebrated work, the Han Shu (Book of Han), is noted as one of the best-known histories ever written and served as a model for all future dynastic histories in China. Another highly acclaimed work by Zhao was Nü Jie (Lessons for Women) a Confucian philosophical text focused on the virtues and education of women. Her other notable contributions include supervising the reproduction of manuscripts from bamboo and silk to paper, and editing the Lienü Zhuan, a compilation of 125 biographies of the great women in Chinese history by previous Han librarian Liu Xiang. Zhao was appointed as librarian and general adviser on all matters at the court of Empress Deng where she became known as the ‘Gifted One.’
Lubna of Cordoba, described by BBC Radio 3 as a ‘woman of many guises,’ was one of the main librarians in Cordoba, as well as the Caliph al Hakam’s private secretary charged with travelling the Islamic world to source and acquire the finest books of the empire. According to the famous Andalusian scholar Ibn Bashkuwal: ‘She excelled in writing, grammar, and poetry. Her knowledge of mathematics was also immense and she was proficient in other sciences as well. There were none in the Umayyad palace as noble as her.’ Some historians found it so difficult to accept that a female polymath could exist in the Muslim world that theories of her being multiple women began to spread.
Baha ud-Din al-Amili migrated from Lebanon to Safavid Persia, benefitting from its vibrant culture to become the region’s greatest polymath since the Islamic Golden Age. He produced numerous important works on mathematics and astronomy including Risa̅lah dar h.all-i ishka̅l-i ’ut.a̅rid wa qamar (Treatise on the problems of the Moon and Mercury), Tashri̅h al-afla̅k (Anatomy of the celestial spheres) and Kholasat al-Hesab (The summa of arithmetic). He was a celebrated architect and engineer who designed many buildings in Isfahan, including the Imam Mosque and the public baths. He was also a revered Sufi poet and Shia theologian and wrote many works on grammar and jurisprudence, as well as tafsir (interpretations) of the Quran and Hadiths.
One of the chief instigators of the Enlightenment in Germany, Gottfried Leibniz, was also its greatest polymath. Diderot said of him that ‘perhaps never has a man read as much, studied as much, meditated more, and written more’ and that ‘when one compares the talents one has with those of a Leibniz, one is tempted to throw away one’s books and go die quietly in the dark of some forgotten corner.’ This is because in addition to being one of the most influential thinkers in the history of philosophy, Leibniz was also a multi-functioning courtier at the House of Brunswick, serving as a lawyer, diplomat, engineer, librarian, alchemist and historian as well as an important scientific scholar of mathematics, physics and geology. He wrote only two book-length philosophical treatises but many other letters, essays and pamphlets. He made further scholarly contributions to psychology (distinguishing between consciousness and unconsciousness), economics (proposing tax reforms and discussing the balance of trade) and language (he studied the origins of Swedish, Sanskrit, Chinese and Hebrew and was himself a polyglot who wrote in multiple languages). His letters took him beyond the subjects already mentioned and it is said that he had up to 1,100 correspondents worldwide with whom he would exchange ideas on a variety of topics.
Mikhail Lomonosov would excel in both the arts and the sciences. Lomonosov started his career as professor of chemistry at the Russian Academy of Science, where he published a catalogue of over 3,000 minerals, explained the formation of icebergs, and became the first person to record the freezing of mercury. As a physicist he regarded heat as a form of motion, suggested the wave theory of light, contributed to the formulation of the kinetic theory of gases, explored the idea of conservation of matter and concluded that the commonly accepted phlogiston theory was false. As an astronomer, he invented and improved the design of a reflecting telescope and become the first person to hypothesise the existence of an atmosphere on Venus. He postulated the existence of Antarctica based on his study of icebergs and continental drift.
As an inventor, Lomonosov developed sea tools that made writing and calculating directions and distances with ease. He organised an expedition to find the Northeast Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans by sailing along the northern coast of Siberia. He also published a history of Russia in 1760. What makes Lomonosov a true polymath, however, was his work in the arts as well as the sciences. He was a poet who wrote in a grammar that reformed the Russian literary language by combining Old Slavonic with the vernacular tongue. He wrote more than 20 solemn ceremonial odes, notably the Evening Meditation on God’s Grandeur. His initial work on the chemistry of minerals led him to develop an interest in the ancient art of mosaics, and he eventually produced some 40 of his own compositions, 24 of which have survived, including masterpieces such as Peter the Great and the Battle of Boltava. In 1763, he set up a glass factory that produced the first stained glass mosaics outside Italy.
Sultan Selim III looked to a talented polymath for some desperately needed military, diplomatic and intellectual breakthroughs. Originally a Hungarian Unitarian, Ibrahim Müteferrika was a janissary (a Christian child slave converted to Islam and trained as a special unit soldier in the Ottoman army) who began his career as a soldier and diplomat with the Ottoman government, and became instrum
ental in developing relations with the Austrians, Russians, Swedish and the French. He is especially renowned as the first Muslim publisher to have run a printing press with moveable Arabic type. He was the first publisher in the Ottoman Empire to be given permission to print secular as well as Islamic books. He published many of his own works, including important treatises on astronomy, military theory, theology, history and economics, and he published in total 17 works in 23 volumes (each having between 500 and 1,000 copies). As part of his work in printing and publishing, Müteferrika also demonstrated his ability as an avid cartographer and engraver. His breakthroughs would allow the Empire to sustain itself at least for the next hundred years.
The Republic of Ragusa (in modern-day Croatia), also under Ottoman control until the beginning of the nineteenth century, was home to another phenomenal polymath of this era. Ruđer Bošković was a diplomat, poet, architect, theologian, engineer and astronomer. Following his migration from his hometown of Dubrovnik to Rome, he was ordained as a Catholic priest and served as a diplomat, confessor and public official. He gained special recognition as an architect involved in the architectural repairs of many iconic buildings in Rome such as St Peter’s Dome, the Duomo of Milan and the library of Ceserea di Vienna, as well as being a civil engineer who worked on numerous projects concerning ports and rivers.
