The Ornament of the World

Spain doesn't figure much in tales of the Vikings. In The Viking Age: A Reader, which I wrote about in an earlier post (here), you can see why. As one medieval chronicler explains, the Vikings, whom the Moors called "Madjus," "arrived in about 80 ships. One might say they had, as it were, filled the ocean with dark red birds, in the same way as they had filled the hearts of men with fear and trembling. After landing at Lisbon, they sailed to Cadiz, then to Sidona, then to Seville. They besieged this city, and took it by storm…" But their success didn't last.

"When war engines were used against them, and reinforcements had arrived from Cordoba, Madjus [the Vikings] were put to flight. They [the Moors] killed about 500 of their men, and took four of their ships with all their cargoes. Ibn-Wazim had these burnt, after selling all that was found in them. Then they [Madjus] were defeated at Talyata on the 25 Safar of this year [11 Nov 844]. Many were killed, others hanged at Seville, others hanged in the palm trees of Talyata, and 30 of their ships were burnt. Those who escaped from the bloodshed embarked. … and were no more heard of."

It's not surprising the Moors repulsed the Vikings so efficiently, for the Muslim caliphate of al-Andalus was the most technologically advanced civilization in Europe at the time. Arabic numerals, the efficient 1-2-3 that replaced the clumsy i-ii-iii, came to the West from Baghdad through al-Andalus during the Viking Age, along with many other advances in mathematics, astronomy, agriculture--even paper-making.

I learned this when writing The Abacus and the Cross, my biography of the pope who reigned when Iceland was converted to Christianity in the year 1000. Pope Sylvester II may even have corresponded with King Olaf Tryggvason, who is credited with christianizing Norway; early historians write of a letter (now lost) in which the pope told the king to quit using runes.

Born Gerbert of Aurillac in about 950, Pope Sylvester II studied mathematics and astronomy near Christian Barcelona from 967-970. (I think of them as his college years.) He learned about Arabic numerals and used them to create a new kind of abacus, or counting board, with which he later taught arithmetic in the cathedral school at Reims, France.

Curious to know more about what Spain was like when young Gerbert arrived, I turned to a book by Maria Menocal of Yale University: The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Little, Brown 2002). Inspired by what I read, I contacted Menocal and requested an interview. She was then in Spain—I wish I had joined her! Instead, I waited until she returned to Yale University and met her there in January of 2008. I attended a lecture she presented and accompanied her and her graduate students to dinner; the next morning I interviewed her about her work.

A year ago, Maria Menocal died of melanoma [http://news.yale.edu/2012/10/15/memoriam-mar-rosa-menocal]. Remembering her insight and her generosity, I want to share a bit of what she taught me about al-Andalus.

 “Cordoba, by the beginning of the tenth century, was an astonishing place, and descriptions by both contemporaries and later historians suffer from the burden of cataloguing the wonders,” she wrote in The Ornament of the World. It was nearly half as big as Baghdad, the largest city of its day. It held hundreds—maybe thousands—of mosques. Running water from aqueducts supplied nine hundred public baths. The goldfish in the palace ponds ate 12,000 loaves of bread. The paved streets were lit all night. The postal service used carrier pigeons. The munitions factory made 20,000 arrows a month. The market held tens of thousands of shops, including bookshops: Seventy scribes worked exclusively on producing Qurans. The Royal Library in Cordoba, just west of the Great Mosque, was said to contain 400,000 books in 976. (By comparison the greatest Christian library of the time, at Bobbio, Italy, held 690 books.)

Menocal took the title of her book from a poem by the nun Hrosvit of Gandersheim, who met an ambassador from Cordoba in 955 at the German court of Otto the Great. “The brilliant ornament of the world shone in the west,” Hrosvit wrote. “Cordoba was its name and it was wealthy and famous and known for its pleasures and resplendent in all things, and especially for its seven streams of wisdom.”

Significantly, only about 50 percent of Cordoba’s 100,000 residents were Muslim. Among the caliph’s viziers, or advisors, was Hasdai ibn Shaprut, who was Jewish, and Bishop Racemundo (the ambassador Hrosvit met), who was Christian. The Quran teaches that, since Moses and Jesus had both been given books by God, Jews and Christians were fellow “Peoples of the Book,” and thus to be tolerated. In al-Andalus, Menocal explained, they “were dealt with under the special terms of a dhimma, a ‘pact’ or ‘covenant’ between the ruling Muslims and the other book communities living in their territories.” They were not forced to convert, but could practice their religions—as long as they did so quietly and didn’t proselytize. Other than having to pay taxes—which Muslims did not—they were not excluded from the city’s social or economic life. They could, and did, fight in the army. Depending on the ruler’s interpretation of the law, they could advance to the highest political posts, as Hasdai and Racemundo did.

Lecturing on her work in the faux-Gothic humanities center at Yale University, Menocal marveled at the fact that medieval Spain has suddenly become relevant. “We now inhabit a previously inconceivable universe, a universe in which the study of the history of medieval Spain can shed light on modern political problems. What does al-Andalus mean? It’s either about 'conviviencia' or 'reconquista,' either about how the three Abrahamic religions could coexist or how they could not.”

“The issue that’s interesting in this period,” Menocal told me the next morning, as she bustled about her office grabbing up papers to take to a departmental meeting, “is how one carves out the wherewithal to have the coexistence of three monotheistic religions that are by definition intolerant.

“Islam arises under conditions where they’re a priori already dealing with these two other monotheistic religions,” she continued. “Medina had a huge population of Jews. For whatever reasons—and they are real political reasons—Islam created the dhimma. I think it does translate into something we could call tolerance. It’s discriminatory, but pretty good, especially in comparison with the other possibilities.

“In Spain it was applied generously, and it provided the basis for much more complex forms of cultural interaction.” Arabic was the lingua franca, not just the language of religion. “To Christians, it was fascinating and very attractive to have this language that was flexible enough to write erotic poetry with and to speak to God with. There’s this whole unimaginable universe that being Arabophone gave you access to: poetry, all the scientific translations coming from Baghdad…”

Or, as she wrote in The Ornament of the World, “This was the chapter of Europe’s culture when Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived side by side and, despite their intractable differences and enduring hostilities, nourished a complex culture of tolerance.” In al-Andalus, “men of unshakable faith saw no contradiction in pursuing the truth, whether philosophical or scientific or religious, across confessional lines.”

It was a powerful combination and produced a civilization to whom an attack of the Vikings was like the descent of a flock of red birds--a flock easily chased away.

Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another writing adventure in Iceland or the medieval world.

In Search of the Scientist Pope

The Abacus and the Cross, my biography of the Scientist Pope, Gerbert of Aurillac (Pope Sylvester II), will be out in paperback this fall. To celebrate, here’s a little essay about my quest to discover the pope of the year 1000:

I thought I spoke French, but the young man’s bright sentences blurred and vanished. My redheaded friend, still flirtatious at fifty, was getting through to him a lot faster in smiles and shrugs and a little Spanish, draping her lime-green scarf across his papers, leaning in.

He was not a monk, though this was a monastery.

We had driven the scalloped edge of Catalonia north: mile upon mile of terraced vineyards, white cliffs sheer to the sea. We had not stopped at the castle with its feet in the tide, or at the winery. I was on a quest.

A forgotten French monk had passed this way a thousand years ago, when most of Spain was Islamic al-Andalus, and Arabic was the language of science. His name was Gerbert of Aurillac. He was the first person in the Christian West to teach math using the nine Arabic numerals and zero. In the year 999, he became pope.

We tracked him through Barcelona, Girona, and Vic. We climbed steep stone stairs to hilltop church-fortresses, surrounded by the tinkling of goat bells—at least we climbed halfway up. We both suffer a fear of heights. We were en route to a clutch of churches high in the Pyrenees when I checked my email. I’d asked a Swiss historian for an interview and told him where I was.

Go to Elne cathedral, he said, où il y a une inscription dans la pierre ... Elle est de Gerbert, distribuée sur une croix… An inscription on a stone. About Gerbert. On a cross.

We found the cathedral, a golden-stone pile on its dusty hill. All the streets in town converged on it, staunch and square, its broad doors barred, its windows higher than a stone could be thrown. A gate in the wall opened into a cemetery—a good place for carved crosses, I thought, but found nothing. My friend tried a door. I followed her giggle and found her, tête-à-tête with handsome Romain.

Elne’s cloister was famous for stone carvings—devils and dragons and laughing sprites. Romain unfolded a brochure to pony us through his French. Peut-être this stone? She is très fameux.

C’est une croix, I said.

He shook his head. There were no famous crosses.

Show him your notebook, Ginger hissed.

Indeed! I had copied out the email.

O! C’est votre professeur? Romain pointed to the name, amazed. He had just mailed the Swiss historian photos of names carved in a stone—O!

In the 1960s they had moved the main altar. Lifting the marble top, they spied names carved on the platform beneath. One was cut in the shape of a cross.

Can I see it?

Désolé. Mass is in session. Then we close. Come back tomorrow? Non? I will send you the photos.

But a photo of this stone was not enough.

In 2005, I volunteered on an archaeological dig in Iceland. We excavated a house built just after the year 1000. Medieval books say a woman named Gudrid explored the New World around the year 1000; she sailed back to Iceland and built a house here, on the very farm where we worked. So I called the dig “Gudrid’s house.” The scientists were annoyed. You cannot say that. That’s a story. You have no proof. Not unless you find a stone by the doorstep that reads Gudrid was here.

Of course, we found no such stone.

The story of the Scientist Pope seems equally improbable. Wasn’t the Church anti-science in the Dark Ages? Yet medieval books say Gerbert was sent by his monastery to the border of Islamic Spain in 967 to learn math. That he started a famous science school at Reims cathedral. That he tutored the Holy Roman Emperor and the king of France.

We understand the Dark Ages about as well as I speak French.

Two months later, I returned to Elne. Thanks to my redheaded friend, Romain remembered me. He dug out a flashlight and led me deep into the darkness of the church. Hung flat on a wall was a large gray stone—like a radiator, exactly—a row of wooden chairs brushing up against it. I stood on a chair to get a better view; he aimed the light. Carved on the uptilted edge of the stone, in the shape of a cross, was the name “Gerbertus.”

I traced the letters with my thumb: Gerbert was here.

Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another adventure in the medieval world.

The Pope’s Abacus

When were Arabic numerals introduced into Western Europe? We used to think it was in the 1100s. But scholars studying the life of Gerbert of Aurillac, who became Pope Sylvester II in 999, have pushed that date back nearly two centuries.

People usually think of a Chinese abacus when they hear the title of my biography of Gerbert, The Abacus and the Cross: colored beads strung on wires set in a frame. Gerbert’s abacus was nothing like that.

It was a counting board: a grid of 27 columns, painted on a flat surface. Later, merchants found having a counting board like this so useful that they drew them on tabletops, which they called “counters.” That is why we now do business “over the counter.”

Arabic Roots

To learn about Gerbert’s abacus, I visited Charles Burnett, Professor of the History of Islamic Influences in Europe at the Warburg Institute in London. In 2001, Burnett discovered a copy of Gerbert’s abacus. It was a stiff poster-sized sheet of parchment that had been trimmed down and reused in the binding of the Giant Bible made for the abbot of Echternach between 1051 and 1081.

The Bible is owned by the National Library of Luxembourg, which had unbound it in 1940 in order to photograph the pages. The abacus was taken out of the binding and, Burnett told me, “It got put in a box. It got lost in the library for several years. My friend, the librarian of rare books, was tidying up and found the original of the abacus sheet.” Noticing the Arabic numerals along the top, the librarian immediately thought of Burnett, who has been writing about the Arabic roots of mathematics since the 1970s.

Shortly after Burnett announced his find, a librarian at the State Archives of Trier called with word of a matching copy “written in the same bold capital letters,” Burnett says. It was also made at Echternach.

           

This second abacus was bound into a manuscript along with notes on multiplication and division, the use of fractions, the etymology of the word digit, and a poem on the names of the nine Arabic numerals and zero. These notes can be dated to 993. Burnett writes, “They appear to be written by a single scholar, at different times, who has made frequent erasures and corrections.” Burnett thinks he was one of Gerbert’s students.

How to Calculate

To use his abacus, Gerbert had 1000 apices or markers made out of cow’s horn. They looked something like modern checkers. Each one was marked with an Arabic numeral. To calculate, Gerbert placed the markers on the counting board and shuffled them around. He could get the answer, one of his contemporaries wrote, quicker than you could say it in words.

Using these new Arabic numerals, Gerbert’s abacus introduced the “place-value” method of calculating: The place, or column, where the marker sat determined the value of the number written on it, whether it meant 5 or 50 or 500.

In 2003, Burnett was a visiting professor at the University of California. “When I was teaching in Berkeley, I actually reconstructed Gerbert’s abacus,” he told me. “I found a shop that specialized in games for children. I bought one of these big rolls of paper and these lovely large numbers—they could substitute very well for the apices, I thought. I drew the columns on this paper—not 27 of them. I didn’t get as complicated as all that. It’s perfectly possible to work out how the procedure worked.”

Did Gerbert Use Zero?

A zero marker was not strictly necessary—to make 50, you put a 5 in the tens column and leave the ones column blank. But the poem in the Trier manuscript does include a zero, looking like a spoked wheel, so Gerbert may have used it as a placeholder. The idea that zero was an actual number would not arrive until much later.

“In the 1120s,” Burnett explained, “there was a change-over from the abacus to the algorithm. The big change is using pen and paper. Also the sign for zero. So the main difference between the look of Gerbert’s abacus and look of the algorithm is, with the algorithm you don’t actually draw the lines for the columns and you have a zero instead of an empty column.”

For a thousand years, we have added, subtracted, multiplied, and divided essentially the same way Gerbert taught his students at the cathedral of Reims.

Photos & Links:

Arabic numerals appear on two pages from the notebook of  one of Gerbert’s students, which Burnett dates to c. 993. The second page shown here is a copy of Gerbert's abacus board. (From MS Trier, Stadtbibliothek 1093/1694 fol.)

One of the frescoes by Gabor Szinte in the Church of St Simon near Aurillac shows a young Gerbert learning about Arabic numerals in Islamic Spain. You can learn about the frescoes on the Aurillac tourism website, here.

Read more about Professor Charles Burnett and his work at the website of the Warburg Institute, London, here.

Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another adventure in the medieval world.