Next to Piero della Vigna, one of the best-known representatives of the Sicilian school, was another lawyer of the imperial court, Notary Giacomo da Lentini. He also stood in close relation with most of the young aristocrats, and in quantity his output exceeds that of any other poet of the time. He is so typical of the school that Dante in the important conversation with Bonagiunta di Lucca picks out “the Notary” as a sample of the old tendencies. Lastly, we should mention the later judge Guido Colonna whose poems, like Reginald of Aquino’s, Dante quotes on occasion.
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Thus in the famous, and infamous, State of Frederick II (the “first modern bureaucracy”!) we find amongst the officials an inner circle of scholars, poets and artists round the Emperor, all men of greater or lesser intellectual gifts, living in considerable intimacy, sharing each other’s many-sided knowledge, and each stimulated by the rest. How widely the Sicilian poets differ from the troubadours in being neither wandering nor professional minstrels! The Sicilian poets, as later the Sicilian sculptors, were bound to the State, were one with it. The pillars of the new poetry were pillars of the State, which claimed the whole of each official, his private gifts as well as his public service. Frederick II had the great art of enlisting everything in his service and letting nothing waste itself in space: but this imposed on the individual an unrelaxing tension, not easy to be borne, from which the wandering minstrel was entirely free. There was no lack of poetic rivalry in Sicily, but it was on a higher plane than the troubadours’ bread-and-butter competition, for the Sicilian poets had no anxiety about their livelihood; they were one and all imperial officials.
The imperial school of poetry differed in another point from the poetry of other courts: at Frederick’s court the Lady was not the centre of chivalrous devotion. According to oriental custom the Empress, with her own court pomp, lived apart from the Emperor in the “harem,” and even Frederick’s many lady-loves played no rôle in the life of his court; we scarcely even know their names. There was only one centre—the Emperor. In this matter Frederick’s court more nearly resembles the papal court than any other of the time. The Emperor’s life amongst his cultured courtiers and officials, in spite of its intellectual recklessness, begot a tensely stimulating mental atmosphere that had not its like in the West, a new virile spirit which would have split everything asunder if it had not been held in the iron grip of the State. This intellectual stimulus was further quickened by the new knowledge of the natural sciences which Frederick himself, supported by many foreign scholars, introduced into his court.
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The appearance of the doctrine of Necessitas, the doctrine of natural laws inherent in things themselves, shows how daringly advanced thought was in those days, how closely in touch with the living and the actual. We can determine this in yet another way. The ancients, starting from the primitive natural world of their Gods and Heroes, rose by a study of natural laws and of “Anankê” to a recognition of “Nous”; then higher and ever higher till at last only one single World “Nous” ruled the universe. After many hundred years the human mind was now descending from the repose of these spiritual heights in which all form was dissolved, retracing again in a downward direction the path by which it had climbed up. Once again a recognition of the living laws of nature, more especially those which were valid throughout the universe, a further descent of the mind to concern itself with earth and the creatures of earth, till Nature, Soul and Spirit, interpenetrated each other on earth in the age of the Medicis in Florence. Each epoch of the Middle Ages found its own time already lived through in the past. Otto III sought to renew the days of Constantine, and his teacher Gerbert, when he became Pope, took the name of Sylvester II to correspond with the bishop of Rome under Constantine. The whole thirteenth century was conscious of a most intimate kinship with the first century of the Christian era, introduced by the prophecy of Abbot Joachim of Flora: the new era which was dawning would resemble that of the first Christians under the apostles. St. Francis as a direct disciple of the Lord seemed to fulfil the prophecy.
Frederick II sought to bring in again the age of Augustus, and the sum of his speculation ultimately reduced itself to a belief that just before the end of the world everything must exactly correspond with the fulness of time of the first century. True, the actual moment, the Day of Redemption, was in a new sense not experienced till Good Friday of the anno santo, the jubilee year 1300, when Dante led by Vergil entered on the path to Paradise.
The philosophico-scientific impulses of the time revert to the early Christian or late classical epochs. The same ancient authors who formerly lured men up into a spiritual world of intellectual abstractions now enabled men gropingly to feel their way down again into the corporeal world. The whole phantom world of late classical philosophy was rediscovered on the way. The normal course of organic growth, to arrive at the general law by abstraction from the individual, was reversed in the Scholastic age. The Scholastic mind, always focussed on the Universal as the first given premiss, the thought accustomed to daily converse with the “Universal,” was able more readily to grasp a general law about the collective Cosmos than the simplest single thing on Earth, and people learned to know Nature in her individual manifestations through intellectual speculation about Law and Species. Anything related to Eternity and the Universal was quickly grasped by the trained mind: Astronomy and Mathematics were, therefore, more immediately understood than Botany and Zoology, and these in their turn more rapidly than the science of men. Plastic art shows every step of the road.
The recent fashion of ascribing to the Middle Ages a feeling for or observation of Nature is simply playing with words. The Middle Ages certainly considered Nature holy as the eternal order of the world, but no one before at earliest 1200 conceived it speculatively and yet intellectually as a live thing, moved by its own forces, throbbing with its own life. No importance attached to it in itself; men preferred to grasp natural phenomena abstractly as allegory and to interpret them transcendentally. A late Alexandrine work, the Physiologus, which was translated into all the vernaculars, reinforced this tendency. It was almost the only source of natural science which the Middle Ages possessed except Pliny and the Encyclopaedia of Isidore of Seville, and it was by far the most popular. The Physiologus was a natural history which gave little anecdotes about the various animals and their habits, and recorded, at great length, their allegorical significance. What the Lion, the Bull and the Unicorn denoted from the moral, astral or cosmic point of view, awakened much more interest than what they, in fact, were.
Bishop Liutprand of Cremona, who was sent in the days of the Ottos as ambassador to Byzantium, exemplifies this type of nature study. He was shown an imperial zoological park in which there was a herd of wild asses. The bishop immediately began to excogitate what significance these wild donkeys might have for the universe. A sibylline saying occurred to him: “Lion and Cat shall conquer the Wild Ass.” Liutprand first thought that this indicated a joint victory of his master Otto I and the Byzantine Emperor Nicephorus, over the Saracens. Then it seemed, however, that the two equally potent monarchs could not well be represented by the mighty lion and the little cat, where upon a little further reflection the true interpretation flashed on him: Lion and Cat were his masters Otto the Great and his young son Otto II, while the wild ass whom they should overcome, as was proved by the zoological garden, was no other than the Emperor Nicephorus himself! Thus Bishop Liutprand, one of the most learned of clerics, envisaged Nature. And yet he was familiar with an immense number of ancient authors: Cicero, Terence, Vegetius, Pliny, Lucretius, Boëthius, to name only a few, and to mention Ovid, Vergil, Horace not at all. In these things the classics carried no weight; people got from them what they brought to them—a moral or an adventure. Even the adventures that you experienced yourself you interpreted intellectually if you were sufficiently learned. The letter of the Chancellor Conrad who describes his Sicilian journey in which he had seen Scylla and Charybdis, and the wonders of the Magic
ian Vergil and the like, shows this projection of the already-known on to the world of fact. In the age of the Crusaders men’s fantasy took colour from the fabled animals and mythical beings of Ovid and Apuleius, the tales of Alexander, the wanderings of Aeneas and Odysseus. Gradually, however, from using their fancy men learned to use their eyes.
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It is remarkable what the ancients, who give to each age according to its need, provided for the Middle Ages. It is probably the only time they have been called on to waken men’s senses to magic and formlessness. The Middle Ages, fast bound in forms and formulas, had enough and more than enough of these. Men who received their real life from another world, a life that revealed itself in unalterable forms which were holy, and beautiful and eternal, had naught to do with transitory life that expressed itself in its own forms. For them the ancients needed to bring no new forms—they often produced effects actually hostile to form—their mission was rather to awaken and set free the hidden smouldering forces. The authors who, among the ancients, had a message for those times were a motley crew, to many of whom access nowadays is almost barred. The favourite works were those innumerable pseudo-Aristotelian writings which seek to make Aristotle “more comprehensible” by neo-platonic speculations. Men, unaccustomed to use their eyes, who were seeking the inner meaning of things from the starting point not of life and man, but of universal thought, could only find an approach to the ancients through such authors as made most appeal to the mind and least to the eye, and for them the Arabs were the best interpreters. The Arabs had sifted ancient literature with but one end in view, and had transplanted everything purely intellectual that would bear transplanting, but their minds were entirely closed to anything that bore the special imprint of Greek and Roman life. Not one single historian did they take over, not one single poet! What were the tragic dramatists to them, the great lyricists! What was Homer to them! They only recognised one line of his as of any value:
εἷς κοίρανος ἔστω· εἷς βασιλεύς
On the other hand they had borrowed all the writings about Natural Science and Medicine, and all the philosophers since Alexander, and of the early philosophers only Plato’s Timaeus, Phaedo and the Republic.
After the natural history writers the Neo-Platonists appealed most to them, and in the neo-platonist version they learned to know the great systematist Aristotle. Even to the great Arab philosophers of the tenth and eleventh centuries, al Kindi, al Farabi and Avicenna, Aristotle was only accessible in the garbled neo-platonist disguise. The great interpreter of the real Aristotle, the Spaniard Averroes, did not appear till the twelfth century. One of the greatest achievements of this great scholar was to reveal to the West in translation and with commentaries a purer Aristotle, and to retranslate other ancient authors from Arabic into western tongues. Averroes died in the year which saw the four-year-old Frederick crowned King of Naples in Palermo, though legend relates that he lived at the court of Frederick.
Translations from the Arabic on an extensive scale began to be made in the twelfth century principally, indeed almost exclusively, in Spain in the school of Toledo, which in the Middle Ages was accounted the headquarters of the magic arts: astrology, necromancy, chiromancy, pyromancy and every other sort of divination. North Italians like Gerard of Cremona worked here alongside Spaniards like Dominicus Gundissalinus. About the turn of the century the first translations of Averroes’ works must have begun to issue from Toledo, and along with them the physics and metaphysics of Aristotle. As early as 1209 these works were forbidden by Pope Innocent III. A second, but less important, collecting place for such works was the Norman court of Palermo, the second entrance gate of Eastern culture. Here men like Eugene of Palermo and Admiral Henry Aristippus were at work, but, as far as is known, the sole translation from the Arabic that here appeared was the Optics of Ptolemy. Palermo was already far more important as a link with Byzantium, and it was chiefly Greek works which were there translated even into Latin: sayings of the Erythraean Sibyl, the Syntax of Ptolemy, the Optics as well as the Elements of Euclid, the writings of Proclus, the Pneumatica of Hero of Alexandria, the logical and meteorological works of Aristotle, Plato’s Meno and Phaedo, etc. Chalcidius’ Latin translation of the Timaeus and the never-lost translations by Boëthius of the Aristotelian Topica, Analytica and Categorica.
We may assume that Frederick was acquainted with the majority of these works. It is also probable that through his intimacy with the Saracens in Palermo he had learned in his boyhood to know the scientific-philosophic writings of the Arabs; he certainly learned to know the Arab mind. In the thirty years of Sicilian chaos which followed on the death of the last Norman king the scholarly activities of the court came to a standstill. Frederick II on every occasion renewed old traditions, and on his return from Germany to his Sicilian kingdom, still more on his return from the East, a period of intellectual activity began at the imperial Court the results of which no longer lagged behind those of Toledo. When Constantinople was conquered by the Crusaders in 1204, and a Latin Empire established there, the interest of Byzantium decreased considerably and Greek studies began to be ousted by Arabic. What the Emperor himself enjoyed at first hand he now proceeded to interpret to the Western world through his numerous scholars.
It was probably when Frederick II visited Bologna on his coronation journey that he first met the most celebrated of all the scholars of his later court: Michael Scot. Little is known with certainty about the Scottish scholar’s life. He began his career at Toledo, where he translated the Spherics of Alpetragius in 1217. Three years later he appears in Bologna, then was for some time in correspondence with the papal Curia, which recommended him to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and he probably came to Frederick about 1227. He had probably made Frederick’s acquaintance first at the same time that the Emperor had made friends with the mathematician, Leonardo of Pisa. Michael Scot, translator, astrologer, philosopher, mathematician and augur, was reckoned a wizard by his age, and Dante consigns to Hell this master of magic and necromancy “practised in every slight of magic wile,” and introduces him as a false prophet of the future with his head turned backwards on his shoulders. Innumerable marvellous and uncanny stories were current about him and the Emperor, and can still be found in the novels and tales of the Romantics. The shuddering awe which Frederick II inspired was shared by his Court Astrologer, whom people called a “second Apollo.” They related that, knowing beforehand the manner of his own death, he always wore an iron cap, and that in spite of it he was killed by a falling stone, exactly as he had foretold. His death probably occurred in 1235 as he was accompanying the Emperor to Germany.
Michael Scot is credited with a considerably larger number of writings than he actually produced. It is, however, certain that he translated Aristotle’s De Caelo and De Anima with the commentaries of Averroes, and also the Aristotelian zoological writings which Avicenna had grouped under the title of Liber animalium: Historiae animalium, De partibus animalium, and other treatises—nineteen books in all. This work was dedicated, like most of his others, to the Emperor. It introduced the Aristotelian zoology for the first time to the West. Master Henry of Cologne made a transcript of the Emperor’s copy in 1232, and this may well have been the copy used by Albertus Magnus. Translations of the Physics and Metaphysics were also ascribed, probably incorrectly, to Michael Scot. His authorship of some obscure philosophical treatises such as the Quaestiones of Nicolas the Peripatetic and a Systematic Philosophy is more probable.
Other Aristotelian writings were known at the Court: the Nicomachaean Ethics, Rhetoric and Meteorology, and, decades later, the Politics also. Pseudo-Aristotelian writings were on the other hand even more numerous. King Manfred later had the treatise De Pomo translated into Latin (Frederick had already had it translated into Hebrew) and presented the Magna Moralia to the University of Paris. Frederick himself quotes in his Falcon Book the pseudo-Aristotelian Mechanics. The so-called Problemata, which a scholar staying in Greece had tra
nslated from the Greek, were dedicated to the Emperor. The so-called Theology or περὶ βασιλείας of Aristotle was also presumably familiar.
Another scholar, Master Theodore, prepared for the Emperor extracts from the Secretum Secretorum which was also ascribed to Aristotle. Master Theodore, like Michael Scot, bore the title of Court Philosopher, and probably succeeded to the latter’s post at Court. He was later even granted a fief. Michael Scot represented the spirit of Spain and Toledo, Theodore rather that of the Arab East. He probably came from Antioch, was said to have studied in Baghdad and Mosul, and had been sent to the Emperor in 1236 by the “Great Khalif,” probably al Kamil of Egypt. He was not allowed to be idle: in the course of a few months he was employed as astrologer to cast the Emperor’s horoscope; as chancery clerk to conduct correspondence with Arab rulers; he was sent to Tunis as ambassador; as a scholar he was set to translate an Arabic treatise, and, lastly—a less intellectual but not less important employment—he had to prepare violet sweetmeats for the court, some of which the Emperor sent to Piero della Vigna who was sick.
Peter the Spaniard described himself in a medical treatise as a pupil of Master Theodore. Nothing further is known about him, nor about the two other men who are styled Court Philosophers: Master John of Palermo and Master Dominicus, probably a Spaniard. Almost all these court scholars maintained close relations with the circle of Leonardo of Pisa, who introduced the system of Arabic numerals to the West. We know that Frederick II met this greatest of all medieval mathematicians in Pisa and conversed with him at length.
Leonardo never actually entered the Emperor’s service, but he sent a revised version of his most important work, the Abacus, to Michael Scot, referred to the “great philosopher” Master Theodore, and dedicated his Liber Quadratorum to the Emperor, who it seems had in earlier years completely mastered the great mathematician’s other writings. The Sultan, al Kamil, had sent a mathematician and astronomer, the learned al Hanifi, to the Emperor, for mathematics were very highly valued by the Emperor personally. The court scholars all found mathematics absolutely indispensable for their astronomical and astrological calculations.
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