CHAPTER VII. Scot Again At Court

SCOT AGAIN AT COURT

The return of Michael Scot from Spain to the Imperial Court was doubtless a striking moment, not only in the life of the philosopher himself, but in the history of letters. He then appeared fresh from a great enterprise, and bringing with him the proofs of its success in the form of the Latin Averroës. We cannot doubt that his reception was worthy of the occasion and of one who had served his master so faithfully.

Frederick was now returned to his dominions in the south. He had established his imperial rights in Germany at the cost of a campaign in which the pretensions of Otho were successfully overcome, and, on his return homeward in 1220, he had received the crown once more in Rome at the hands of the supreme ecclesiastical authority. His progress was indeed a continual scene of triumph. Arrived at Palermo, the court gave itself up to feasting and gaiety of every kind.

Two ancient romantic authorities choose with dramatic instinct this moment, and these gay and voluptuous surroundings, as the mise en scène amid which they show us Scot again appearing to resume the place he had quitted more than ten years before. It is quite possible that there may be a measure of historic truth here, as well as the art which can seize or create an occasion, and which loves to contrast the triumph of arms with the more peaceful honours of literary fame. Frederick, we must remember, in a sort represented both. He was Maecenas as well as Caesar. In welcoming Michael Scot and doing him honour at these imperial banquets he was but crowning the success of an enterprise in which his own name and interest were deeply engaged.

Traces of the impression made by this highly significant incident have been preserved in the arts of poetry and painting as well as in that of prose romance. Dante, who wrote his Divine Comedy less than a century later than the time of Scot, has given the philosopher a place in his poem, describing him as:

‘Quell’altro, che ne’ fianchi è così poco, Michele Scotto fu.’

The commentators, with great reason, refer the epithet ‘poco’ to the manner of Scot’s dress. It would seem that the Spaniards of those days differed from the other European nations in their habit. They wore a close girdle about the waist, like the hhezum of the East; and indeed they had probably taken the fashion from long familiarity with their Moorish masters and neighbours. Scot must have adopted such a dress while at Toledo, and thus, when he returned to Palermo, the singularity of his appearance struck the eyes of the court at once. The impression proved a remarkably enduring one, since, even in Dante’s day, it still persisted, offering itself, as we have seen, to the poet as a picturesque means of presenting the famous scholar to the world, not without a hidden reference to what was certainly one of the crowning moments of his life.

We may suspect indeed that the fashion of Scot’s dress was more than simply Spanish; for the mode of Aragon at least must surely have been too familiar at Frederick’s court to excite so much attention. The philosopher had lived long in close company with the Moors of Toledo and Cordova. What he wore was probably no mere fragment of Eastern fashion but the complete costume of an Arabian sage. The flowing robes, the close-girt waist, the pointed cap, were not unknown in Sicily where there was still a considerable Moorish population, yet they must have sat strangely enough upon Scot when once he declared himself for what he was: the reverend ecclesiastic, the Master of Paris, the native of the far north.

There is a fresco on the south wall of the Spanish Chapel in the cloisters of Santa Maria Novella of Florence which contains a figure answering nearly to this conjecture regarding Scot’s appearance. It is that of a man in the prime of life, slight and dark, with a short brown beard trimmed to a point. He wears a long close-fitting robe of a reddish colour, noticeably narrow at the waist, with a falling girdle. On his head is a tall red pointed cap from which the ringlets of his dark hair escape on each side. He stands among the converts of the Dominican preachers and bends towards the spectator with an intense expression and action as he tears the leaves out of a heretical book that rests on his knee. It would be too much to assert that the figure we have described was meant as a portrait of Michael Scot, yet considering the place he holds in the Divine Comedy, it is not impossible that such an idea may have crossed the artist’s mind and left these traces in his work. Certainly no better pictorial illustration can be found, at once of Dante’s lines, and of the somewhat equivocal reputation which began to haunt Scot from the time of his return to court. There was indeed a singular fitness in the Moslem dress considered as the daily wear of one who, though a Christian and a Churchman, had just done more than any living scholar to introduce the Moorish science and philosophy in the West. His choice of such a fashion is evidence that Michael Scot possessed a ready adaptability to his circumstances, and even a vein of aesthetic and dramatic instinct which we might not otherwise have suspected. But it is not to be forgotten that his versions of Averroës were already condemned by the Church, and that the very manner of Scot’s appearance when he brought them from Spain must have heightened the suspicions of heresy which began to attach themselves to the translator of these forbidden works. The only hope for such a man was that he might be induced to tear his book and turn to less dangerous pursuits. This is exactly the idea which the painter of the Spanish Chapel has expressed, and in a form which accords so remarkably with the picturesque description of Michael Scot by Dante.

If the philosopher did not actually take such extreme measures with the creatures of his brain and pen, the versions he brought to Sicily were at least suppressed in the meantime, being concealed in the imperial closet till a more suitable opportunity should occur for their publication. This done, their author devoted himself to pursuits less likely to attract unfavourable notice than those in which he had been lately engaged.

The place and duty which most naturally offered themselves to Scot were those of the Court Astrologer. We have seen him occupied in this way already, before he left Palermo for Spain, and there seems no reason to doubt the tradition which says that such was indeed the standing occupation of his life, and one which he resumed at once on his return. To this application of celestial science the opinion of the times attached no sinister interpretation, and Scot, finding himself the object of suspicion on account of his late studies and achievements, must have fallen back with a sense of security, strange as it may seem, upon the casting of horoscopes and the forming of presages founded on the flight of birds and the motion of animals.

It is therefore in all likelihood to this period in his life that we are to ascribe several works on astrology and kindred subjects which bear the name of Scot. They may have come from his pen by way of supplement to the doctrine which he had expounded so many years before in the Liber Introductorius. Such are the Astrologia of the Munich Library, and a curious volume preserved in the Hof-Bibliothek of Vienna with the following title: ‘Michaelis Scoti Capitulum de iis quae generaliter significantur in partibus duodecim Caeli, sive Domibus.’ The De Presagiis Stellarum et Elementaribus, and the Notitia convinctionis Mundi terrestris cum Coelesti, cited by the writer on Scot in the Encyclopedia Britannica, belong apparently to the same class.

We shall probably commit no error in assuming that the astrological views of Scot at this period were substantially the same as those embodied in his earlier writings on that subject. In after ages they were severely censured by Pico della Mirandola, who says of Scot’s doctrine concerning the stellar images: ‘These invisible forms can be discerned neither by the senses nor by right reason, and there is no agreement regarding them by their inventors, who were not the Chaldeans or Indians but only the Arabs.’ … ‘Michael Scot mentions all these (images) as things most effectual, and with him agree many astrologers, both Arabian and Latin. I had heard somewhat of this doctrine, and thought at first that it was meant merely as a convenient means of mapping out the sky, and not that these figures actually existed in the heavens.…’ ‘From the Greeks astrology passed to the Arabs and was taught with ever-growing assurance.…’ ‘Aboasar, a grammarian and historical writer, took this science from the Greeks, corrupting it with countless trifling fables, and made thereof an astrology much worse than that of Ptolemy.…’ ‘In those days the study of mathematics, like that of philosophy in general, made great progress in Spain under King Alphonso, a keen student in the calculus, especially as applied to the movements of the heavenly bodies. He had also a taste for the vain arts of the Diviner, having learned no better; and to please him in this many of the most important treatises of that kind, both Greek and Arabic, have been handed down to our own day, chiefly by the labours of Johannes Hispalensis and Michael Scot, the latter of whom was an author of no weight and full of superstition. Albertus Magnus at first was somewhat carried away with this doctrine, for it came with the power of novelty to his inexperienced youth, but I rather think that his opinions suffered change in later life.’ Mirandola belonged to another age than that of Scot, when purer conceptions of astronomical science were already beginning to prevail, but the very opinions he condemned held a real relation to that progress. They encouraged in early times, as may be seen in the case of Alphonso himself, a study of the heavenly motions without which no true advance could have been made.

A story told by the chronicler Salimbene may, if rightly understood, show us that Michael Scot too, for all his astrological dreams, was a clever calculator and thus stood well in the line on which true advance in astronomy was even then proceeding. The Emperor asked him one day to determine the distance of the coelum, which probably means the height of the roof, in a certain hall of the palace where they happened to be standing together. The calculation having been made and the result given, Frederick took occasion to send Scot on a distant journey, and, while he was away, the proportions of the room were slightly but sufficiently altered. On his return the Emperor led him where they had been before and asked that he should repeat his solution of the problem. Scot unhesitatingly affirmed that a change had taken place; either the floor was higher or the coelum lower than before: an answer which made all men marvel at his skill. Greek science had taught the art of measuring inaccessible distances by means of angular observations, and this art was well understood by the Arabs. The Optica of Ptolemy were already translated into Latin from an Arabic version by Eugenio, admiral to King Robert of Sicily during the twelfth century, and mathematical instruments were known in that kingdom whereby angles could be taken and measured with some nicety. Scot must have possessed such an astrolabe and the skill to use it with great delicacy, if we have rightly read the terms of the problem he solved so unhesitatingly. There is no cause for wonder then in the fact that, where pure and legitimate astronomy was concerned, this philosopher, who had won fame in his student days as the mathematician of Paris, who was now widely known as the translator of Alpetrongi, and who as a keen observer and ready calculator was well qualified for original research, should have taken a high place in these studies on his own account, and should have come to be acknowledged as a master in them. Even Bacon, who blamed Michael Scot so bitterly when language or philosophy were in question, speaks in a different way here, calling him a ‘notable inquirer into matter, motion, and the course of the constellations.’

This well-earned celebrity may have been owing in no small degree to a mathematical and astronomical work produced by the philosopher after his return to court. Sacrobosco, the famous English astronomer, had just risen into notice by his treatise on the Sphere. This book was not indeed very remarkable in itself, but it obtained an extraordinary currency during the Middle Ages, and after the invention of printing as well as before it: a popularity chiefly due, we may believe, to its suggestiveness, which caused many of the learned to enrich the Sphere of Sacrobosco with their own notes and observations. One of the first to do so was Michael Scot. His commentary on the work of Holywood contains several subtle inquiries and determinations regarding the source of heat, the sphericity of the heavenly bodies, and other matters, which have been repeated by Libri with the remark that their author must have been far in advance of his times.

We may notice here a curious legend of Naples to which Sir Walter Scott has drawn attention in the account he gives of his great namesake. It would seem to suggest that this age, perhaps by means of Michael Scot, was acquainted with philosophical instruments rarer if not more useful than the astrolabe. The romance of Vergilius tells how that hero founded ‘in the middes of the see a fayer towne, with great landes belongynge to it; … and called it Napells. And the fandacyon of it was of egges, and in that towne of Napells he made a tower with iiii corners, and in the toppe he set an apell upon an yron yarde, and no man culd pull away that apell without he brake it; and thoroughe that yren set he a bolte, and in that bolte set he a egge. And he henge the apell by the stauke upon a cheyne, and so hangeth it still. And when the egge styrreth, so shoulde the towne of Napells quake; and when the egge brake, then shulde the towne sinke,’ The reference here is of course to the Castel del Ovo at Naples, a fortress which we know to have been built, or at least strengthened, by Frederick II. What if the rest of the legend embalm, like a fly in amber, the tradition, strangely altered, of some instrument set up there to measure the force of the earthquakes so prevalent in that part of Italy?

Such a notion is not the pure matter of conjecture it may at first sight seem to be. Frederick was in relation with those who might well have put him in possession of this among other secrets. When the Tartars stormed the Vulture’s Nest, as it was called, in the Syrian castle of Alamout, they found an observatory well supplied with instruments of precision, and that of all kinds. Now this place was the last refuge of the Assassins, that strange sect who owned obedience to the Old Man of the Mountain. Frederick II. when in the East paid these people a visit, and again at Melfi, in his own dominions, he received their ambassadors and entertained them at a great banquet. Considering then the Emperor’s well-known curiosity in all matters of physical science, we may feel sure he would profit by any improvements or discoveries the observers at Alamout could communicate. If the contrivance set up at Naples was really a seismometer, this would furnish a curious comment on Bacon’s statement that Michael Scot excelled in investigating the movements of matter.

Passing to what rests on more certain evidence, we find Scot’s fame in those days attested by one of his most distinguished contemporaries, and that in a way which makes him appear as an honoured master in the science of algebra, then lately introduced from the Moorish schools. This improvement and testimony were both of them due to a certain Leonardo of the Bonacci family of Pisa, who was, perhaps, the first to bring the new method of calculation to the knowledge of his countrymen. His father had been overseer of the customs at Bougie, in Barbary, on behalf of the Pisan merchants who traded thither. Observing the superior way of reckoning used by the Moors in that country, he sent home for his son that the boy might be trained in this admirable way of counting. Leonardo perfected his art in after years by travel and study in Egypt, Syria, and Greece, as well as in Sicily and Provence. The ripe fruit of this knowledge saw the light in 1222, when he published for the first time his famous Liber Abbaci. It consisted of fifteen chapters, in which the author declared the secret of the Indian numerals as well as the fundamental processes of algebra.

This brief account of one who must ever hold an honourable place in the history of mathematical science may enable us to value at its true worth the praise which Leonardo bestowed on Michael Scot. It seems that the first edition of the Liber Abbaci was not entirely satisfactory. Scot wrote a letter to the author which possibly contained strictures on the work, and asked that a copy of the emended edition should be sent him. Pisano replied by dedicating the book to his correspondent. It appeared in 1228, and contained a prefatory letter, in which the author addresses Scot in the highest terms of respect, calling him by that title of Supreme Master which he had won at Paris, and submitting the Liber Abbaci, even in this its final form, to his further emendation. This laudari a laudato must have been most grateful to the philosopher, and it enables us to see the standing he had among the mathematicians of his time. One would almost be disposed to infer, from the respect Pisano paid him, that Scot himself had composed or translated some lost work on algebra. In another connection we shall find reason to think that this conjecture may be well founded.

Besides the practice of astrology and his deeper researches in astronomy and mathematics, Michael Scot devoted himself to another profession, that of medicine. This was then a science very imperfectly understood, yet here too, in the years that followed his return to court, Scot made a name for himself as a physician, and contributed something to the advancement of human knowledge in one of its most important branches. The healing art in Europe had only just begun to emerge from that primitive state in which savage peoples still possess it; overlaid by charms and incantations; the peculiar department of the wise woman, the sorcerer, and the priest. Among the Latin races the lady of the castle and the bella donna of the village still cared for rich and poor in their various accidents and sicknesses, as indeed they continued to do for several ages more. Only crowned heads, the wealthiest of the nobility, or the rich merchants of the cities, began to require and employ the services of regular physicians. These were generally Jews, sometimes Moors; and thus fashion and experience alike began to make popular among our ancestors the superior claims of science in medicine. Such science had undoubtedly survived from the days and in the works of Hippocrates, Galen, and Celsus, and was now preserved in the theory and practice of the Arabian schools.

This point once reached, a further advance soon became inevitable. Attention had been called to a deeper source of medical knowledge than that generally possessed in the West. Learned men, whose tastes led them this way, naturally sought to inform their minds by procuring translations of the Arabic works on medicine. The just fame of Salerno, a medical school which had been founded in the closing years of the eleventh century by Robert Guiscard, depended on the intelligent zeal with which this plan of research was then pursued. The kingdom of Sicily indeed occupies as important a place in the progress of the healing art as Spain itself does with regard to the history of philosophy and of science in general.

Frederick II., as might have been expected, did much to encourage and regulate these useful studies. We have already noticed the bent of his mind towards comparative physiology, and the daring experiments he carried out, in corpore vili et vivo. One of the first literary and scientific works which he commanded, or at least accepted when it was dedicated to him, was a compilation from three ancient authors upon a medical subject. He was then but eighteen years of age. As time went on his interest in this science continued, and became the motive to a liberal and enlightened policy. He regarded medicine as a matter of national importance, and strove by wise laws to make the practice of that profession as intelligent and useful as possible. He protected the faculty at Salerno and created that of Naples. None might lecture elsewhere in the Sicilies, and every physician in the kingdom must hold testimonials from one or other of these schools, as well as a government licence to practise. The course preliminary to qualification consisted of three years in arts and five in medicine and surgery. As a guide to the professors, the doctrine of Hippocrates and Galen was declared normal in the schools; yet, lest this should become merely formal and traditional, directions were given that the students should have practice in anatomy. Regarding the related trade of the apothecary, the laws denounced the adulteration of drugs. Physicians might not claim a greater fee than half a taren of gold per diem, which gave the patient a right to be visited thrice in the day. The poor were to be attended free of charge. We have thought it right to be particular in these details, as they throw light on the times, and on Scot’s own practice as a physician. Considering indeed the place he held about the Emperor’s person, and the high estimation in which his master held him, it seems not at all improbable that his may have been the hand which drew these wise enactments, or his at least the suggestion which commended them to Frederick. They must in any case have been the rules under which he carried on his work as a doctor of medicine.

This branch of Michael Scot’s activity relates itself easily and naturally to what we already know of his acquirements and familiarity with the Arabian authors. It was from the De Medicina of Rases that he borrowed so much material for his Physionomia. The Abbreviatio Avicennae too, which he translated for Frederick in 1210, was in no small part a treatise on comparative anatomy and physiology, nor is it likely that he can have missed reading the famous canon of the same author, in which Avicenna expounds a complete body of practical medicine. We need not wonder then to find that, on Scot’s return to court, his work on Averroës done, he added the practice of physic to his duties as Imperial Astrologer. This new profession must have offered itself to him as another means of securing a general forgetfulness of the questionable direction in which his philosophical studies had lately carried him.

He seems in fact to have won almost as much fame in medicine as he had made for himself in the study of mathematics. Lesley says ‘he gained much praise as a philosopher, astronomer, and physician.’ Dempster speaks of his ‘singular skill,’ calling him ‘one of the first physicians for learning’ and adding that Camperius had the highest opinion of him. An anonymous writer, De claris Doctrina Scotis, is even more precise, telling us that Scot was noted for the cures he effected in difficult cases, and that he excelled in the treatment of leprosy, gout, and dropsy.

Some slight remains of this skill are to be found in the libraries of Europe; for Michael Scot was a writer on the science of his art as well as a practising physician. The chief of these relics is a considerable work on the urine. This subject had been widely, if not deeply, studied by the more ancient medical authorities, whose investigations appear in the Ketab Albaul of Al Kairouani, and in a book to which we have already more than once referred: the De Urinis compiled for Frederick in 1212. The same title belongs to one of the treatises by Avicenna, which has been reprinted in the present century.

The De Urinis of Michael Scot seems now extant in the form of an Italian translation alone. The exact title is as follows: ‘Della notitia e prognosticatione dell’orine, secondo Michele Scoto, così de’ sani, come delli infermi,’ or, more briefly, ‘El trattato de le urine secondo Michaele Scoto.’ The author enumerates no less than nineteen divisions of his subject, which he seems to have studied very exactly. This work long remained an authority in the medical schools, as appears, not only from the two translations we have noticed, but also in the fact that large use was made of it in a later collection which commences thus: ‘In the name of the Lord, Amen. These are certain recipes taken from the book of Master Michael Scot, Physician to the Emperor Frederick, and from the works of other Doctors.’

There has also come down to us a prescription called Pillulae Magistri Michaelis Scoti. It enumerates about a dozen ingredients and the scribe has added an extravagant commendation of its healing powers. Mineral medicines were evidently not in fashion in those days; for the recipe speaks only of simples derived from herbs of different kinds. It is to be observed that this agrees exactly with the practice of Salerno, as the Materia Medica of that school was chiefly drawn from the botany of Dioscorides afterwards expounded by Ibn Beithar of Malaga, the great Moorish authority on the healing virtues of plants. There is no reason then to doubt the truth of the title which ascribes the prescription for these pills to Michael Scot. It is in any case a curious relic of early medical practice.

It is possible that the great plague which fell upon Palermo at the time of Frederick’s marriage may have been, in part at least, the occasion of that interest which both the Emperor and his astrologer took in the healing art. These epidemics, which in several of their most fatal forms are now only known by tradition, were the dreaded scourge of the Middle Ages; their prevalence being no doubt due to the rude and insanitary habits of life which were then universal. We read of another infectious sickness which attacked Frederick and his crusaders when they were on the point of sailing from Brindisi in 1227. The season was one of terrible heat, so great indeed that one chronicle says the rays of the sun melted solid metal! Lying in the confinement of their galleys on an unhealthy coast the troops suffered severely. At last rain fell, but immediately poisonous damps arose from the steaming soil, and the plague began to show itself. Two bishops and the Landgrave of Thuringia were among the victims of the pestilence, and very many of the crusaders died. Frederick himself ran considerable risk of his life. Against the advice of his physician he had exposed himself to the sun in the course of his journey to Brindisi. After three days with the fleet he was obliged to return on account of the state of his health, when he at once went to the waters at Pozzuoli, which proved a successful cure. Michael Scot must have entered into these affairs with a large concern and responsibility for his master’s health, and we shall think much of the importance and consequence he enjoyed at this time when we remember that the chief object of his care as a physician was the life of one on whom interests that were more than European then depended.