The earlier background of Postel, his childhood, education, and his acquisition of Hebrew and Arabic, as well as the other languages that he apparently knew, remain obscure. But the fact that he was selected to join the French delegation to Constantinople must mean that he had already acquired some fame as someone who knew what was then known as oriental languages, so that he could possibly act as an interpreter to the French delegation. It would be most interesting to find out the name of the Person who could have taught him Arabic in Paris in the early part of the sixteenth century. And was the Paris environment, in terms of exposure to such oriental languages as Arabic, much different from other cities in Eastern Europe and northern Italy where Copernicus spent his professional career, or was it the norm? Such a question bears directly on Copernicus's access to Arabic scientific material, which did not have to be translated into Latin.
Postel's trip to Constantinople was apparently quite successful, for in addition to the two Arabic manuscripts that he owned there were others that were signaled by Della Vida, which may have ended up in other European libraries.[338] And because of the signature of the treaty, which must have pleased the French king,[339] Postel was apparently rewarded with an appointment as professor of mathematics and oriental languages at the Collège Royal which later became the Collège de France. The philosophical Arabic manuscript, of the Leiden Library, clearly attests to this appointment since it is signed "Royal Professor of mathematics",[340] which must refer to his official appointment to the College.
But Postel did not last long at the Collège, and for reasons that remain partially obscure he was dismissed of this post by 1543, the year when Copernicus died. From then on, his life took a dramatic turn as he began to pursue cultural and religious topics, but continued to make further trips to the Islamic world and to acquire other Arabic scientific texts, most notably between the years 1548 and 1551. Several of his trips took him through northern Italy, where he was finally involved in a spiritual conversion that may have cost him his demise and his eventual imprisonment by the Pope and his retreat to a convent near Paris where he finally passed away in 1581.
Other manuscripts at other libraries such as the Bodleian (Oxford) and the Laurentiana (Florence), some from Copernicus's lifetime while others from after his death, also contain similar marginal annotations, and sometimes even interlinear translations.[341] Such evidence attests to a widespread interest in most European cities in the Islamic sciences contained in those manuscripts.
The causes of this European interest in Islamic science at these latter ages remain very poorly studied. One can understand the reasons for it from the period of Copernicus's own lifetime, since the status of science in the European cities at that time was almost on equal footing with that which had been known in the Islamic lands. But the interest seems to continue well into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And that becomes much more puzzling.[342]
Other questions remain of interest in this respect, and relate to the image of Arabic/Islamic science in those European cities in contrast to the image of the more ancient sciences. From the evidence that has survived so far, and this widespread interest in almost all fields of science, one may safely speculate that to a Renaissance person of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries Arabic science must have seemed quite advanced over and above the more classical Greek science, especially in the field of Astronomy. Such a person would have known from several sources, and particularly from the often quoted disparaging remarks that were made by Averroes himself in his own commentaries on the Aristotelian works, that Ptolemaic astronomy had been under attack in the Islamic world. Someone like Andreas Alpagus (d. 1522), who lived and studied in Damascus for about 15 years and who returned to Padua, probably near the turn of the sixteenth century, to assume the chair of medicine at Padua in 1505, thus possibly overlapping with Copernicus's sojourn in that general area where he acquired his last degree in canon law from nearby Ferrara, may have known of the attacks against Ptolemaic astronomy, or may even have heard about the remarkable reform of that astronomy that had been accomplished by Ibn al-Shāṭir (1375) of the same city of Damascus nearly 100 years earlier.
All these contacts with the Islamic world, of which we gave here the bare minimum by way of examples,[343] would have easily brought the news that the old Greek astronomy was already in great dispute in the Islamic lands, and that its results as well as its basic foundations were severely questioned and at times even overturned. A Renaissance person would then have every reason to seek information about these latest reforms that took place already in the Islamic world, and would in all likelihood only keep an antiquarian interest in the details of Greek astronomy. In such a setting, the image of Islamic science in Renaissance Europe would have attained a status similar to the one it attained in Byzantium in the early part of the fourteenth century, where astronomers would travel from Constantinople to Trebizond, in order to acquire the latest of Islamic astronomy, as was done by the author of the Byzantine Greek manuscript who brought the Ṭūsī Couple into Greek.
There is no doubt, then, that there were enough Arabists in various European cities who were not only writing Arabic grammars, as Postel did, but who were like Postel equally competent enough to read the technical contents of scientific manuscripts and to understand their import and thus pass them on either orally or even by request in a tutorial fashion. With Poland, where Copernicus was born, being so close to the borders of the Ottoman empire at the time, and with the free flow of books, trade, and scholars across the Mediterranean through the northern Italian cities, where Copernicus received his education, we must suspect that there were many people like Postel who could have advised or even tutored Copernicus on the contents of Arabic astronomical texts. Now that we have established the likelihood of another route, one hopes that future research will continue to explore it in order to explain the likelihood of such a scenario.
Lest we think that planetary theories were a special case of their own, and that contacts between the world of Islam and Renaissance Europe were restricted to connections with Copernican astronomy only, it is important to note that similar exchanges were taking place in a variety of other disciplines.[344] At this point, a few examples from cognate fields like the field of scientific instruments should be enough to make the point. Such supplementary evidence points to two curious instances that demonstrate a close connection between the instruments that were being produced in Renaissance Europe and those that were already produced in the Islamic world. Those instruments were produced centuries apart and their existence simply signals the range of contacts between the Islamic world and Renaissance Europe.
338
See for example the other Arabic manuscript at Leiden University Library, Or 2073, which was also signed by Postel as having been among his possessions. I owe this reference to my friend Dr. Maroun Aouad of the CNRS, Paris.
340
That is, "Mathematum Professoris Regii" as quoted by Maroun Aouad, from Leiden Ms. Or. 2073, in
341
See, for example, Laurentiana Ms. Or 218, which contains interlinear translations of a commentary on the
342
See, for example, the translation of the elementary treatise by Ibn al-Haitham "On the Elevation of the Pole", which was translated by Jacob Golios in 1643, still preserved at the British Museum Ms. Add. 3034, dated 1646, and the publication of Rāzī's treatise on the Smallpox, which was published in London in 1760, with Latin and Arabic on facing pages, See Rhazes
343
Other earlier contacts involving Regiomontanus (1476) have been tentatively put forward by F. Jamil Ragep in "'Alī Qushjī and Regiomontanus: Eccentric Transformations and Copernican Revolutions",
344
See for example similar contacts in the mathematical field as illustrated by Cifoletti, "Creation of the History of Algebra", and other works of Rashed on the subject.