The Friar and the Cipher (5 page)

Although Averroës was a devout Muslim, he was not himself a theologian or even a philosopher per se. That is perhaps why, like Avicenna, although his aim was to integrate Aristotle and Plato into Islam, he looked more to the Greeks than to the Qu'ran for the basis of his work. Also as with Avicenna, this approach did not endear him to what was becoming an increasingly fundamentalist Islamic clergy. Averroës, enjoying the protection of kings, continued to work until, in 1194, Emir al-Mansur ordered all of his writings (except a small number that were considered pure science) burned. The emir also decreed that no one at all should read philosophy and that his subjects should throw all philosophical works into the fire. Averroës was sent into exile for heresy. He was recalled four years later but died soon afterward, in 1198, just as Innocent III was ascending to the papacy.

The death of Averroës coincided with a pivotal juncture in European history. For his own people, it marked the final downturn of empire. As the Arabs retreated further and further into religious fanaticism and intolerance, infidels began to carve up their possessions. Within decades, all Spain except Granada was lost to the Christians, crusaders took Jerusalem, and the Mongols under the Khans swept through Muslim Asia and attacked and destroyed Baghdad.

But as the legacy of Averroës faded along with the glory of the Islamic south, it was accelerating a new blaze of science and empirical thought in the Christian north. European scholars traveled to areas of Arab influence, control, or legacy expressly to seek new learning and then returned to the universities to pass it along. As a result, from an odd swirl of languages, religions, and nationalities, Europe became the beneficiary of the single most prolific infusion of knowledge in its history.

ALTHOUGH TOLEDO WAS THE FIRST SOURCE
of the new learning, another kingdom to the west soon rivaled Spain for the importance of the translated material that it sent to the universities of Italy and northern Europe. It was the Sicily of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II.

The Holy Roman Empire was a loose, often shifting confederation of kingdoms in central and southern Europe. Shaped by wars, alliances, and treaties, by the thirteenth century the Holy Roman Empire—described by Voltaire as “neither holy, Roman, nor an empire”—was primarily German, but it included the wealthy and strategically placed island of Sicily.

Entitled by birth to rule both Sicily and Germany, Frederick, grandson of the ferocious Barbarossa (“Redbeard”) and heir to the Hohenstaufen dynasty, had been made a ward of Innocent III after the death of his parents when he was four. Innocent, seizing the opportunity to retain the empire for the papacy, shunted him off with guardians.

When Frederick was about seven, he began to be seen as a rallying point in Sicily by those opposed to papal rule. Some of those appointed by Innocent to “care” for the boy then attempted to kill him, but Frederick was snatched away by supporters. He was taken in and fed by one family after another and proceeded to grow up on the streets of Sicily, hiding from his powerful enemies and learning to live by his wits. Sicily was then the center of the world, the meeting place of all cultures—Christians, Muslims, Byzantines, Africans, and Jews—a wealthy, exotic milieu of tastes and smells, customs and tongues. Frederick, who had been taught to read somewhere along the way, acquired an affinity for history and mathematics. He learned Arabic and Hebrew, as well as Latin. By the time he was in his mid-teens, Frederick was already every bit the pope's match for intelligence, cunning, and ambition.

Then, when Frederick was eighteen, as a buffer against the ambitions of a would-be emperor, a hulking dimwit named Otto the Welf, Innocent, convinced of his own infallibility, granted the boy his birthright and declared him Holy Roman Emperor and ruler of Sicily.

Underestimating this blond, handsome teenager was to be the greatest blunder of Innocent's career. Frederick would grow into a scholar, warrior, poet, freethinker, mathematician, and scientist, and nearly achieve his grandfather's ambition to conquer Rome itself. He would come to personify secular power and thought, questioning the fundamental tenets of scripture and the rules by which medieval Europe lived. More important, Frederick, later referred to as “the Antichrist” by future popes, would provide a focal point for the scientific revolution in which Roger Bacon participated so significantly and come within a whisper of creating sufficient momentum for it to overpower a thousand years of Christian dogma.

The new emperor Frederick II quickly threw off the papal yoke and used Sicily's fabulous wealth to create the most flamboyant court in all Europe. He himself became known as
Stupor Mundi,
the wonder of the world. He traveled with a menagerie of exotic animals and birds, including leopards, panthers, bears, peacocks, doves, ostriches, a giraffe on a chain, and an elephant with a small tower on its back. He had slaves in silk, wagons of treasure, a variety of bric-a-brac rendered in gold and precious jewels. He had a harem and an army of Saracen slaves. For dinner he ate figs, dates, and nuts, all unknown to the northern palate. Northern European visitors were stunned by the opulence and Byzantine grandeur of his court. He might have been the emperor of Christendom, but he looked like the Sultan of Baghdad.

This appearance was no coincidence, because in his heart he was much more Arab than Hohenstaufen. Perhaps because he was the only Christian ruler with a firsthand knowledge of the Arab Empire, the only one to have actually met one of his Arabian counterparts, the only one to exchange letters and gifts, he was also the only one to really appreciate how advanced Arab civilization had become—to dare to think it more advanced than Christendom.

Frederick was personally the most educated monarch in Europe. He was conversant in at least seven languages and could read three or four. He devoured classics that had been translated in the previous century, and his knowledge of mathematics was superior to that of almost any scholar in Europe. He sent such complicated geometry problems to the sultan of Damascus that the sultan was forced to pass them on to his most advanced Egyptian mathematicians for solution. Another sultan, noting the emperor's interest in science, sent Frederick the gift of an astrolabe, used for measuring the altitude of the sun and the stars. Frederick was the only ruler in Europe to write his own book, called
On the Art of Hunting with Birds
. In it, he carefully detailed precise observations of different species and their habits, including migratory patterns. He once had a vulture's eyes sewn shut to test whether the birds hunted by sight or by smell.

He was so consumed by the new learning that in 1224 he established his own university at Naples on the Italian mainland and actively recruited scholars, poets, painters, and scientific thinkers to his court for the purpose of translating and studying scientific works. One of these, an English astrologer, would be as responsible as anyone in history for bringing the blessing and curse of Aristotle to Europe.

Michael Scot had been a translator in Toledo before relocating to Frederick's court. He was equal parts scientist, philosopher, and quack. Frederick was so impressed with Michael's knowledge of Arab scholarship that he appointed him court astrologer and general all-around sage. With the emperor's encouragement, Michael Scot practiced alchemy and conducted experiments, detailing his observations in a scientific manner.
*1

Michael Scot's most important contribution, however, was his translation into Latin from Arabic of Aristotle's works on natural science, the
libri naturales,
such treatises as
On the Parts of Animals, On the Generation of Animals,
and the
Physics
. He also translated more provocative texts—the
Metaphysics, On the Heavens,
and
Ethics
. More than that, he included his own translations of the commentaries of Avicenna and Averroës.

These were just the sort of secular subjects that Frederick held dear and Rome feared. Michael's translations made their way to Paris, and would be the very translations later used by Albertus Magnus and Bacon himself to propound their views on experimental science. “Although only some of his works on logic and certain others have been translated from Greek by Boethius, yet from the time of Michael Scotus, whose translations with authentic expositions of certain parts of Aristotle's works on nature and metaphysics appeared in the year of our Lord 1230, the philosophy of Aristotle has grown in importance among the Latins,” Roger Bacon was to write later.

The combination of Michael Scot's translations and the commentaries of Averroës shook Christian orthodoxy. There were indeed some passages in this new Aristotle that called into question not only the old, accepted, logical Aristotle but also some fundamental tenets of the Christian faith. Three elements in particular seemed devastating.

First, Aristotle said quite specifically in the
Metaphysics
that the universe was eternal, with no beginning or end, that it had simply “always been.” The Bible, on the other hand, said equally specifically that God had created the heavens and the earth in a finite period by an act of will. Second, Aristotle claimed that after death an individual's soul blended into what he called “the tenth intelligence,” a kind of generalized soul that was surprisingly reminiscent of the discredited Plotinus. This was taken (correctly) to mean that Aristotle denied the immortality of the individual soul as Christians recognized it, which therefore rendered the concepts of heaven and hell meaningless. Without the promise of heaven—or the fear of hell—the authority of the Church to create and enforce standards of behavior would erode considerably.

The big one, however, the problem that seemed utterly irreconcilable with the Christian faith, was the Aristotelian division (as interpreted by Averroës) of truth into two distinct forms—that which could be known by reason (philosophy) and that which must be accepted by faith (religion). While the division of reason and faith was not in itself repugnant to Christians—it had, after all, been a cornerstone of St. Augustine's work—faith being
subordinate
to reason, consigned as the
lesser
truth (as Aristotle seemed to have clearly stated), was anathema. If philosophy was to represent the highest level of knowledge, what would happen to the rule of God and, worse, the rule of God's agents on earth—the pope and his cardinals, bishops, and priests?

In short, what Aristotle presented in these new translated works, in vastly greater detail and breadth than the old, was a philosophy of science itself, a theory of how to make sense of it all and use the knowledge for human advancement. The man who had given the Church not only its method of learning but also its fundamental truths of nature, such as the geocentric universe and the composition of matter as mixtures of the four basic elements of air, fire, water, and earth, was now saying that the fundamental tenets of Christianity—to say nothing of the Bible—that the very manner in which Christians viewed this world, and the world beyond, were
wrong
.

Michael Scot's translations reinforced the already powerful pull toward secular knowledge that had begun with the translated manuscripts from Spain. The new knowledge from the south was proving both irresistible and inexorable in the north, and for the first time large numbers of students from across Europe came to cities such as Paris to study Aristotle rather than the
Sentences
. That, in turn, led to a radical increase in the number—and influence—of masters who taught only science or the arts and often were not even members of the clergy themselves. Still, control of education had always been a cornerstone of ecclesiastic power, and, since in the past no one outside the clergy had been much interested in schooling, many theologians felt that it would be a simple matter to seize control of the universities.

CHAPTER FOUR

Dogma, Drink, and Dissent:
The University of Paris

•   •   •

BY THE TIME ROGER BACON WENT TO SCHOOL IN 1228,
about ten universities had been founded across Europe. Of these, the undeniable apex was Paris. Paris had been the beneficiary of a happy combination of convenient geography, a pleasant climate, status as a capital city, and an enthusiastic, devout line of kings. “The Italians have the Papacy, the Germans have the Empire, and the French have Learning” went a medieval saying.

For all this Learning, however, it was necessary to have Students, and students were (and still are) a mixed blessing. By the 1190s, students and masters composed more than a tenth of Paris's total population of about 30,000. As education turned secular, more and more students entered school specifically to gain an undergraduate arts degree and become doctors, lawyers, or clerks. They came from all over Europe, and from every stratum of society. There were noblemen and peasants, French, Germans, Italians, Spanish, English, and everyone in between. The vast majority of this new transient population was between the ages of fourteen and eighteen—and they were all boys.

Paris very quickly developed into a classic college town. Twenty-first-century parents will be interested to learn that university life has not changed very much in nearly a millennium. The overwhelming preponderance of letters home, for example, were pleas for money. Since many of the fourteen-year-olds who arrived at the school had not yet had the chance to learn to write, there were the equivalent of form letters for the purpose of conniving money out of parents or patrons, with blank spaces for the student's name and his target. “A much copied exercise contained twenty-two different methods of approaching an archdeacon on this ever delicate subject,” observed Charles Haskins in his meticulously researched
Studies in Medieval Culture
.

A sample letter, composed by a teacher for the benefit of his students (upon whom he was reliant for his fees), went as follows:

I know not what to offer you, my sweet father, since I am your son, and after God, entirely your own creature—so completely yours that I can give you nothing. But if I can remember what the child's instinct prompts it to say, I might sing, as the cuckoo incessantly sings, “Da, da, da, da”: and this little song I am compelled to sing at this moment, for the money which you gave me so liberally for my studies last time is now all spent, and I am in debt to the tune of more than five shillings . . .

Hormones were also a major problem. There was quite a lot of drinking and brawling. The undergraduates fought with themselves, with the townspeople, with the masters, and with their servants. The students were
so
unruly, in fact, that sometimes the masters were forced to close down the university altogether. There was a great deal of interest in women as well. Since many of the city's landlords refused to rent to students or provide teaching space, classes were held in the seamier sections of town, often over brothels. This made the Paris prostitutes a kind of adjunct faculty.

A famous thirteenth-century minstrel named Rutebeuf summed up the situation this way:

THE SONG OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS

Much argument is heard of late,

The subject I'll attempt to state,

The student-folk of Paris town

(I speak of those in cap and gown,

Students of art, philosophy—

In short, “the University,”

And not our old-time learned men)

Have stirred up trouble here again.

To give his son a chance to stay

In Paris, growing wise each day,

Is some old peasant's one ambition.

To pay his bills and his tuition

The poor hard-working father slaves;

Sends him each farthing that he saves,

While he in misery will stay

On his scant plot of land to pray

That his hard toil may help to raise

His son to honor and to praise.

But once the son is safe in town

The story then reads upside down.

Forgetting all his pledges now,

The earnings of his father's plow

He spends for weapons, not for books.

Dawdling through city streets, he looks

To find some pretty, loitering wench,

Or idle brawl by tavern bench;

Wanders at will and prie about

Till money fails and gown wears out.—

Then he starts fresh on the old round;

Why sow good seed on barren ground?

But swaggering hauberks, as they sit

Drowning in drink their feeble wit;

While three or four of them excite

Four hundred students to a fight,

And close the University.

(Not such a great calamity!)

Why send a boy away to school

There to become an arrant fool?

When he should be acquiring sense,

He wastes his time and all his pence,

And to his friends brings only shame,

While they suppose him winning fame.
*2

The animosity between the university and the rest of the city grew steadily until, in 1200, the school won a decisive victory over the citizens of Paris. The incident began when a German student's servant went down to the local pub to purchase some wine for his employer. There was a disagreement over price, and the tavern owner insulted the servant. The servant went back to the German student empty-handed. The student rounded up some of his compatriots and took them to the bar, where they proceeded to trash the establishment and beat up the owner. There was outrage in the city, and the civilian authority, under the command of the royal provost, got up its own mob, went over to the German student's quarters, and in retaliation killed a bunch of university people, including the German student.

The masters, who understood their growing power in a city that was becoming more and more dependent on the university as an industry, called on the king to act against his own provost. They threatened to close the school and initiate a mass exodus of the faculty if their demands were not met. Philip Augustus was in power, and he ruled without hesitation in favor of the masters. Not only did he throw all of the Parisians involved in the incident, including his own provost, into prison for life, but he seized their lands, burned their houses, and then pursued those who fled from the city across France and brought them back for the same punishment. Just to make sure nobody crossed this line again, Philip Augustus issued a charter giving all scholars clerical status, which meant that they could not be tried in civil courts, nor could their property or persons be seized.

In the end, though, the primacy of the University of Paris was secured not by the kings of France but by its most powerful alumnus, Innocent III. Innocent, who had seen the potential of the University firsthand, moved quickly to make Paris the vehicle with which to provide Rome with a steady stream of superior theology graduates. In 1209, he issued a charter confirming what amounted to a guild of masters and essentially placed it under papal protection, a policy that would be continued by subsequent popes. From that time on, the University of Paris became the papacy's school, the acme of theological study, and, most important, a prerequisite to high ecclesiastic office.

Innocent and the theological faculty were in fundamental agreement over what should and should not be taught, but the arts faculty had different ideas. All those brawling, drunken students, who came to the school not to study theology but for degrees in law or medicine gave the arts masters significant clout and helped them grow into a political force. By sheer power of numbers, the arts faculty could now battle on equal terms with the more conservative theology masters. At the time, no one anticipated that this battle would evolve into the philosophical struggle for the soul of Christianity that it was to become, with the arts masters—of whom Roger Bacon would become the most prominent example—championing science and a more intellectually inclusive Church and the theology masters trying to hold back the dual tides of reform and secular knowledge.

The rift began in earnest in 1210, when Peter of Corbeil, the archbishop of Sens, who had been Innocent's own theological master at Paris two decades earlier, banned a number of books representing the new learning, among them Aristotle's works on natural philosophy (as science was known through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance) and Avicenna's commentaries. The banned books were not to be “read at Paris in public or secret.” This ban would be reissued periodically, but to no avail. The arts faculty continued to read and debate Aristotle and his commentators. It seemed that even Innocent's great personal power would not be enough to prevent the arts masters from teaching whatever they liked, and thereby undermining his plans for the future of the Church.

Then, suddenly, fate threw a wild card into the mix. Two new religious orders came into being. Each embraced as its primary goals poverty, charity, and a simple Christlike existence, yet each would nonetheless recruit among its members the best scientific minds of the time and turn them loose on the universities. One of these orders would come to be known for exalting Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, the other for suppressing Roger Bacon. Each order was referred to by the name of its founder—St. Dominic de Guzman and St. Francis of Assisi. The Dominicans and the Franciscans would entirely alter the balance of power both in the universities and in the Church at large and determine the course of science for the next four centuries.

ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI IS ONE OF THE BEST KNOWN,
best loved, and most influential figures in all of religious history. Born in Italy in 1182, the ne'er-do-well son of a wealthy businessman, as a child he dreamed of the romance of chivalry and knighthood. He was given a cursory education in Latin and set up in his father's business, to which he paid little attention, preferring to spend money rather than to earn it. His life was gay, generous, and entirely frivolous.

His conversion came swiftly and irresistibly. The emptiness of his existence struck him, and about 1206, when he was in his twenties, he began to act strangely. He for whom “the sight of lepers was so bitter in the days of vanity that he looked at their houses two miles off and held his nose,” astonished his friends by kissing one; soon after he stole money from his father in order to give it to an impoverished priest. For this act he was renounced by his family and, left entirely to his own devices, began to beg for lepers, the poor, and himself.

In 1209, while listening to the Gospel being read at church, he had an epiphany. As the priest read from Matthew, “As ye go preach, saying, the kingdom of heaven is at hand . . . Possess neither gold nor silver nor money in your purses, no wallet for your journey, nor two coats nor shoe,” Francis cried out, “This is what I am seeking!” From that time on he devoted himself to poverty and preaching, seeking to emulate the simple life of Christ. The force of his faith, in combination with his appealing personality and gentleness, brought him a motley crew of twelve followers, including a nobleman, a peasant, and an idiot, and, being informed that he needed the pope's approval to start an order, Francis journeyed to Rome to see Innocent III.

At the time, heretical sects were on the rise; a German bishop estimated that there were 150 operating in Europe. This increase was a threat not simply to the faith; the sects were seizing Church property and controlling sections of Europe as if the Church did not exist. Of these, the one that represented by far the greatest threat was in the south of France. Known as Cathars or Albigensians, like Francis of Assisi they preached the simple life (although they did not believe in begging), a direct response to the excesses of a Church that allowed bishops and legates to live like kings. The Albigensians did not recognize the authority of the pope, and developed their own rituals.

Realizing that the Cathars drew their appeal from the revulsion of common people to the excesses of Church officials, Innocent had already sent a Spanish bishop, Diego de Acevedo, and his canon, Domingo de Guzmán, to Languedoc, the French province that was the Cathars' spiritual center. The two Spaniards, both with a reputation for simple piety, imitated the Cathar “perfects” (priests) and traveled about like apostles, on foot, going door to door, begging bread and preaching the Gospel. Soon the bishop died, and Domingo, or Dominic, as he was known in Latin, continued alone, amassing a group of followers who now had a pious alternative to the Cathar heresy.

But one man could do only so much, and the number of Cathars swelled. At this point, Innocent did something unprecedented in the annals of Christian history: he called for a crusade, not against the infidel Muslims for the recapture of Jerusalem, but against fellow Europeans. Encouraged first by Philip Augustus and then by his son, Louis VIII, who saw this as an opportunity to swallow up huge sections of the south, the crusade was conducted with as great a ferocity as has ever been perpetrated in the name of God. Year after year, knights and soldiers from the north, led by Arnold Amaury, a Cistercian monk, and the ruthless warrior Simon de Montfort, the second son of an impecunious but famous noble French family, swept down the countryside, surrounding and besieging Albigensian men, women, and children. If the Cathars surrendered, they were slaughtered or horribly mutilated.

In the face of all this, it took a pope with the clear-sighted pragmatism of Innocent to recognize that Francis of Assisi's request for a new order based on total renunciation of the temptations of worldly life was not another heretical threat but an opportunity. Francis was committed to unconditional, absolute obedience to the pope, so Innocent gave him the authority to preach and establish the Order of the Friars Minor (Little Brothers).