Still, the disproportionate number of copies that were produced in the first place calls for a comment. Did the Medici Oriental Press prospector expect the missionaries to use more of the Elements than they would use the Bible for the conversion activity? And if that was the purpose, the actual sales seem to support such a contention. The records show that the Arabic Bible sold 934 copies, while the re-worked Elements outdid that and sold 1,033 copies. Based on sheer numbers alone, could one draw the ironic conclusion that a re-working of Euclid's Elements served a better purpose in converting people to Christianity than the Bible itself?
Similarly, one has to wonder also as to why the first six Arabic books that were published by this press would include four that had something to do with linguistic or demonstrative sciences and not that much relevance to religious material. Such linguistic and scientific texts were abundantly available in manuscript form all over the lands of Islam, as any survey of extant library holdings can demonstrate. So what kind of profit a good Medici businessman could have expected to make by shipping those books to the lands of Islam?
When we consider the Renaissance environment, which apparently witnessed a great interest in Arabic scientific texts, one has to conclude that the real market for the Medici Oriental Press was in fact the European centers of learning who were calling for a return to the original Arabic rather than depending on translations. Didn't Andreas Alpagus (d. 1522) use the excuse of the unreliable medieval translations from Arabic in order to go to Damascus and learn Arabic so that he can produce new translations of Avicenna's works, a feat that he actually accomplished? And didn't Zacharias Rosenbach (c. 1614), when the press was still functioning, propose that the learning of Arabic be introduced in the Herborn Academy for the medical students so that they could read Avicenna's Canon in the original?[363] All these calls for Arabic texts must have sounded enticing for a good businessman seeking an investment, and Patriarch Ni'matallāh's library came in handy as it supplied the raw material for such an enterprising publishing endeavor.
That most of Ni'matallāh's books are still held in the Laurentiana Library speaks directly to this engagement between the Medicis and the Patriarch. But this was not the only contribution the Patriarch was to make to the intellectual life of the Renaissance. Sixteenth-century Europe had been obsessed with the problem of reforming the calendar as the celebration of Easter was continuing to slip backwards. And earlier councils, to which even Copernicus made a proposal for reforming the calendar, could not agree on the reform.[364] The job was finally left to the committee that was appointed by Pope Gregory XIII in order that it would specifically accomplish this task.
One of the distinguished members of that committee was the same Patriarch Ni'matallāh. His role on that committee should be quite understandable as he was the one who had brought along with him astronomical books that contained values for the lunar month and the solar year that were much more refined than the values that were found in the old Greek sources, or the prevailing medieval European sources.[365] With his services on that committee, Ni'matallāh became an actual participant in the making of the European Renaissance, just as much as his two predecessors Leo Africanus and Paolo Orsini did before.
What bearing does all this have on the works of Copernicus, and the problem of the transmission of Islamic scientific ideas to him, as most of these names and activities mentioned here date either to the late or to the post Copernican period? In fact, the more we can document the reliance on Arabic scientific sources from the period following Copernicus, when the whole world view was supposed to have been changed by him, and by others like him who created what is now called the Copernican Revolution, the more one is forced to ask why was there such a need for Arabic texts in the latter part of the sixteenth century and early seventeenth? And if one can document that interest, as the few examples we have given here seem to do together with many more that were left unmentioned, then shouldn't one expect even a greater eagerness on the part of Renaissance scientists to learn from those Arabic sources in the earlier period when the revolution had not yet taken place?
With all this evidence that was admittedly gathered here solely for the purpose of explaining the specific connections that seem to exist between the Copernican astronomical texts and the Arabic antecedents from the world of Islam, things begin to look like we unintentionally stumbled on a Pandora's box. And with very little effort in documenting the connections whole areas of research have come to life as a result. Churchmen like Postel and Widmanstadt, who seemed like they were involved in strict church activities, turn out to have been knowledgeable Arabists and men of science in their own right. We can even tell that they were following in the footsteps of other Arabists like Ambroseo Taseo (d. 1539), Andrea Alpagus (d. 1522), and before them Hieronimo Ramnusio (d. 1486 in Beirut) who were even much more glorious than them, and who may have laid the foundation for this intercultural exchange whose import we are now just beginning to appreciate.
But by looking at the works of these men, whether in the form of the fresh translations of Arabic scientific and philosophical texts by Andreas, or the still extant commentaries of Postel on more sophisticated astronomical texts, we cannot avoid but reach the conclusion that the Renaissance engagement with the Islamic world was of a completely different order than the engagement that took place during the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages people relied more on the translations, and waited for them to be produced before they could use them. That was how the Latin translations of Averroes made their impact on Latin thinkers. But by the Renaissance time, men of science themselves apparently became Arabists and no longer needed the translations. They could go directly to the Arabic texts and exploit the ideas contained therein. Otherwise, how else can we explain the several occurrences we noted so far in astronomy and medicine as well as in the other sciences where we have original ideas that were developed in the Islamic world, expressly to object and reformulate the Greek classical scientific tradition, only to reappear a couple of centuries later in the works of Renaissance scientists without ever having those Arabic texts translated into Latin? Copernicus or his collaborator or instructors, Michael Servetus and Realdo Colombo in medicine, all seem to have followed that route.
This evidence can only lead us to look further into the works of these Renaissance men of science, not only to document those ideas, but in order to understand the nature of Renaissance science itself, and to understand the methods and techniques that were integral to the formation of that science. Most strikingly though, it looks like the Renaissance men of science were apparently looking to the world of Islam for the latest in scientific activities rather than looking to the Greek classical sources, especially for those sciences that were more of the empirical type like astronomy and medicine which needed to be constantly updated. In fact, one can hardly see an astronomical value adopted by a Renaissance scientist that was derived directly from the ancient Greek sources. For example, one no longer found a precession value that was as badly off as that of Ptolemy, or the inclination of the ecliptic as reported by Ptolemy, or the fixed solar apogee that was already proved wrong in ninth-century Baghdad. Even the kind of reasoning that was followed by Ptolemy, while constructing his mathematical predictive models, also became obsolete. Rather one found the latest results that were developed in the Arabic sources that could answer much better the same problems the Greek classical tradition had to answer.
363
For this requirement, see Ursula Weisser, "Avicenna: Influence on Medical Studies in the West", in
365
On the extensive role of the Patriarch on that committee, see G. Coyne, M. Hoskin, and O. Pedersen,