The claim that I wish to make here is that the very similarity between the calligraphic design of the Arabic phrase and the shape of the tulip may have motivated the Arsenius astrolabists to produce such similar retes, thus at once paying a very clever homage to the Islamic tradition, which they knew rather well when they fitted retes for Arabic astrolabes, and to the tulip craze that hit the Netherlands during their time. The craze itself appears to have been occasioned by the importation of tulips from the sixteenth-century Ottoman domain.[353] The solution of this very intriguing problem has to wait for further work on Islamic metal works, astrolabes, and calligraphic designs in general, and on the routes that those works followed as they came into Europe. For now, the striking similarities between the two retes remain interesting as they demonstrate a certain relationship between the astrolabists of the Islamic domain and their European counterparts, even if that relationship may not be as well confirmed as the relationship of fitting a Latin rete on an Arabic astrolabe mater, as was done by one Arsenius astrolabist.
For those who work in the field of Instruments, very many other such instances will readily come to mind. And I am almost certain that they will agree with me that these examples can be multiplied manifold. But the two examples we have supplied so far should give us enough indication that the cognate field of instruments should also be investigated in the same context of contacts between the world of Islam and Renaissance Europe.
Up to this point in the discussion, I have given few examples of the activities of European Arabists and orientalists in their pursuit of science from Islamic land, and tried to assess the reasons for such interests. I had not intended an exhaustive treatment of the subject, which is worthy of a whole monograph by itself.[354] I only needed to hint to the possible sites of interaction between Renaissance Europe and the world of Islam. But I have neglected to mention that we do have some evidence of men of science who crossed over from the Islamic lands into various European cities, and of course brought with them the sciences that they knew from their old countries.
The case of al-Ḥasan b. Muḥammad Ibn al-Wazzān, better known as Leo Africanus (d. ca. 1550), immediately comes to mind.[355] Although Leo came from the western part of the Islamic world, he nevertheless had traveled extensively over all of North Africa and parts of the east. What concerns us here is that he was a man of great intellect, and was apparently very well acquainted with the Islamic intellectual scene of his day. More importantly, Leo was a contemporary of Copernicus, and a man of great scientific knowledge, who also taught Arabic at Bologna.[356] He may have come across people, or even taught some, who knew Copernicus themselves. His teaching Arabic at Bologna is significant in itself as well. For Bologna fell along the famous corridor from Venice to Florence, along which many Renaissance intellectual activities took place. Leo's personal output is slightly better known than others on account of his geographical writings that included tidbits of his personal accounts. But his intellectual life and his impact on Renaissance scientists, as well as his role in introducing scientific ideas from Arabic into Latin, is still not fully investigated from the perspective of the Renaissance knowledge of Arabic Islamic science. A scientific biography of this distinguished pioneer scientist and belletrist is long overdue.
There were others too. For example, one could easily name members of the circle of the distinguished orientalist, Jean-Albert Widmanstadt (1506-c.1559), who was also a contemporary of Copernicus, and who may have also played a very important role in the transmission of Islamic scientific ideas to Europe; a role at least just as important as that of Guillaume Postel, whose input was already noted before.[357] A quick search for Widmenstadt's role revealed, to my pleasant surprise, that this Widmanstadt was himself a student of Leo Africanus,[358] and also knew much Arabic material as well as the scientific contents of Arabic astronomical texts. In our context his role should be seen as part of the influence of Leo Africanus on Renaissance thought, but should also be considered as part of the network of orientalists who were contemporaries of Copernicus and who may have known about the achievements of Islamic astronomy and were competent enough to bring it to the attention of Copernicus.
One can be certain that there were many more people who came in contact with Leo Africanus, and who may have either received information about scientific ideas directly from him or were guided by him to others who could supply the same. But until the field is fully explored with those questions in mind, we cannot be certain about the kind of information that was transmitted, nor about the people who played as conduits for this transmission. One thing we can be sure of is that there are much too many coincidences of ideas appearing first in Arabic texts, usually written between the twelfth and the fifteenth century, which reappear, without much explanation, in Latin sources of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In most cases the original Arabic texts containing these ideas had never been "translated" into Latin in the strict sense of the word.
Others who followed similar routes as that of Leo Africanus, but at least under slightly different circumstances—if not of their own volition as far as we can tell—included people such as the Syriac Jacobite patriarch Ni'matallāh, better known by his Latin name Nehemias (d. 1590).[359] This patriarch was involved in a series of conflicts in his native town, Diyār Bakr, of southeast modern Turkey, and in his own patriarchate of Antioch and All the East. At one point, his life became so endangered that he felt he had to flee to the Papal see via Venice. And in order to secure a generous Papal reception he used the excuse that he would help bring his followers back to the fold of the Roman church, and under the Papal flag. A note left at the margin of an elementary mathematical manuscript, still kept at the Laurentiana Library in Florence, describes in some personal nostalgic terms the difficulties of his trip, saying that he was being tossed by the waves of the Adriatic Sea, during the year 1888 of the Greeks (1577 A.D.), on his way to Venice.[360]
Once in Venice, apparently without knowing a word of Latin or Italian, he was attached to an eastern "traveler" by the name of Paolo Orsini. Orsini, who then acted as Ni'matallāh's interpreter, was originally a captured Turkish soldier, who, like Leo Africanus before him, accepted to convert to Christianity. The two went to Rome, of course via Florence, as most people were prone to do in those days. Along the way, or maybe more likely in Rome itself, he made the acquaintance of the Cardinal Ferdinand de Medici who later became the Duke of Tuscany. Like all the Medici's, Ferdinand could quickly recognize a commercial enterprise when he saw one. With the invention of printing nearly 100 years old, and with Arabic not yet being exploited for that purpose, the Arabic books that the Patriarch was trucking along, which were all in manuscript form were too tempting to Ferdinand. He saw in them the possibility of starting an Arabic press and using those books, as the bases for the printed versions.[361]
Of course, the excuse Ferdinand used, at least openly, was that he would use the press to produce reading material for the missionaries who could go out and convert the Muslims to Christianity. But the actual record of what was printed and sold at the Medici Oriental Press tells a different story.[362] While it may be quite understandable to produce 1,500 copies of the Arabic Bible for missionary activities, it would be much harder to justify the production of 3,000 copies of Euclid's Elements for the same purpose. And if one were to think that the publication of the Elements served a wider Renaissance purpose of recovering the scientific works of classical antiquity, one will be disappointed to learn that the Elements that were published by the Medici Oriental Press were not of the original Arabic translations of the Greek Elements (and two good translations are still extant), but rather a slightly modified version of the Elements. And what the Medici press published as Euclid's Elements was in turn a re-working of yet another re-working that was already produced toward the middle of the thirteenth century by the very same astronomer/mathematician Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī who was mentioned several times already.
353
I wish to express my gratitude for this information on the tulip craze and its Ottoman origins to my colleague and friend Professor Jeanne Nuechterlein.
354
In fact there are such monographs devoted to the subject. In particular see Angelo de Gubernatis,
355
See
357
For more information on this very interesting person, see the short discussion of his association with Copernican astronomy in Swerdlow and Neugebauer,
359
For information about this patriarch, see Yūḥannā 'Azzô, "Risālat al-baṭriyark Ighnāṭyūs Ni'meh",
361
For the exploits of this patriarch in Italy, see Robert Jones,
362
The works of Robert Jones have been helpful in documenting the details about this press. See Robert Jones,