The History of the Renaissance World (10 page)

An Almoravid army arrived from Marrakesh to help beat Alfonso VII back. But the siege dragged on, until messengers hurried down from Oreja to Marrakesh to ask for further reinforcements. They were, says the
Chronica
, “confounded, for events were not turning out as they had wished,” and they got no joy from Marrakesh; informed that no more reinforcements were available, they were forced to return to Oreja with the message that they “should not harbour any hope and that they should surrender the castle to the emperor.”
³

Oreja surrendered in October. It was a major victory for Alfonso VII, who now set his eyes on Córdoba and Seville. Meanwhile, the Almoravids had suffered an even more serious defeat farther west. Alfonso VII’s cousin Afonso Henriques, who governed the Leonese province known as Portugal, had been carrying on the fight south of his own land. In July, he had won his first major victory against Almoravid armies: the Battle of Ourique, fought on a hilltop not far from the coast.

Few contemporary details of the battle survive; it may have been little more than a large-scale raid into Almoravid-held territory.
*
But Afonso Henriques, cheered on by his men, declared himself king of Portugal immediately afterwards. This made him, in theory, independent of his royal cousin, and turned Portugal into a kingdom in its own right.

Alfonso VII refused to recognize the title, but he did not immediately invade the rebellious province; he was too busy. By 1144, his army was approaching Córdoba and Seville. The
Chronica
tells us that they

destroyed all the vines, olive groves and fig trees. They cut down and set alight all the orchards, set fire to their towns, villages and hamlets, and sent up in flames many of their castles. They took their men, women and children captive, and seized a great booty of horses, mares, camels, mules, asses, oxen, cows and every kind of beast, gold and silver, all the valuables which were in their homes. . . . All the kingdom . . . was destroyed.
⁴

The devastating victories placed Spain even more firmly in Christian hands.

6.1 The Spanish Peninsula, 1144

A
ROUND THAT SAME YEAR
, the Italian scholar Gerard of Cremona traveled to the Spanish peninsula, hoping to find in the libraries of Toledo a copy of the second-century Greek astronomy text known as the
Almagest
.

He was not the first Western thinker to make the journey. A century and half earlier, the future Pope Sylvester II had traveled to a monastery near the Muslim-Christian border; there, he learned to use the numbering system of the Arabs, discovered by them in their forays into India. Unlike the cumbersome Roman system, these numbers (generally now known as Hindu-Arabic numerals) relied on place for their value. (“The Indians have a most subtle talent,” marveled the monk Vigila, later in the tenth century, “this is clear in the 9 figures with which they are able to designate each and every degree of each order.”) He had been followed by a whole parade of Europeans and the occasional Englishman: among them Robert of Ketton and Hermann of Carinthia, who first translated the entire Qur’an into Latin, and Plato of Tivoli, who did the same with Arabic texts on astronomy and mathematics.
⁵

Now, with Gerard of Cremona, the rediscovery of Arabic texts surged forward. In Toledo, Gerard discovered a treasure trove of books he had never known existed. Among the books he unearthed in the dusty unused stacks of the Toledo libraries were a handful that had been translated from Greek into Arabic, but had never before been read in the Latin-speaking West: the
Physics
of Aristotle, containing the philosophical explorations of being that the Aristotelian texts on logic did not touch; the
Elements
of Euclid; the
Secrets
of the great Greek physician Galen.

“Seeing the abundance of books in Arabic on every subject,” one of his students later wrote, “he learned the Arabic language in order to be able to translate. . . . [T]o the end of his life, he continued to transmit to the Latin world (as if to his own beloved heir) whatever books he thought finest, in many subjects, as accurately and as plainly as he could.” By the time of his death, some thirty years later, Gerard had translated at least seventy-one major works on dialectic, astronomy, philosophy, mathematics, and medicine. A wall between the past and the present had been broken down, and more and more thinkers would step over the rubble into a new way of thinking.
⁶

6.1 Early thirteenth-century Arabic mansucript, showing Aristotle teaching Turkish astronomers.
Credit: Bridgeman-Giraudon / Art Resource, NY

*
A more detailed account is found in Bauer,
The History of the Medieval World
, pp. 664–666.

*
León-Castile had been held by Urraca since 1109; although it was part of the united realm of Alfonso VI, the couple was deeply estranged. When Urraca died in 1126, Alfonso VII (her son with her first husband, Raymond of Burgundy) took her place, still under the overarching authority of his stepfather, Alfonso the Battler.

*
In the years afterward, Ourique loomed larger and larger in Portuguese eyes: the number of Almoravid troops killed increased, the Portuguese valor expanded, and the victory swelled, until by the sixteenth century Afonso Henriques had defeated five Muslim kings after seeing, Constantine-like, a vision of Christ promising victory over the pagans. None of these details, however, are contemporary.

Chapter Seven

Questions of Authority

Between 1135 and 1160,
Peter Abelard shows the power of Aristotelian logic,
and systematic theology is born

S
OMETIME AROUND
1135, the theologian Peter Abelard put the final touches on his latest project: the
Theologia Scholarium
, a treatise on the nature of God.

He had been polishing and revising the
Theologia
for fourteen years, ever since the first version of the book had been condemned as dangerous error. Back then, Abelard had been forced by a church council in Soissons to throw his book into a bonfire with his own hands. Now he hoped to defend his orthodoxy.

Instead, he would find himself facing yet another church council; and this time, the punishment would be more extreme.

For over forty years, Abelard had lived and breathed language. He had spent his teens studying the works of Aristotle in Paris and sharpening his skill with words: “I preferred the weapons of dialectic to all other teachings of philosophy,” Abelard wrote, of his own early years, “and armed with these I chose the conflicts of disputation instead of the trophies of war.” In 1102, still only in his early twenties, he set up his own school in the French town of Melun. He taught and wrote, debated and argued; and his fame as a master of logic grew. By 1114, he had become master of the cathedral school at Notre Dame, the most prestigious in Western Francia.
¹

Only one thing had ever distracted Peter Abelard from words: Heloise, the beautiful niece of the Parisian priest Fulbert. In a calculated act of seduction, Abelard rented a room from Heloise’s uncle and offered to tutor Heloise in order to work off his rent. “And so, with our lessons as a pretext,” he tells us, “we abandoned ourselves entirely to love. Her studies allowed us to withdraw in private, as love desired. . . . My hands strayed oftener to her bosom than to the pages . . . [and] our desires left no stage of lovemaking untried.”
²

The inevitable happened; Heloise became pregnant, and Abelard took her to stay with his sister in Brittany until the baby was born.

Fulbert, who up until then had been remarkably blind to the affair, flew into a rage. Abelard apologized, groveled, reassured, and generally did his best to make amends to his powerful landlord, but the most straightforward solution—marriage—was not on the cards. The master of a cathedral school was, by definition, a churchman; celibacy was increasingly the rule for churchmen, and marriage would cut Abelard’s career off at the roots.

Unable to appease the powerful Fulbert, Abelard finally proposed a solution. He would marry Heloise, but the marriage would remain secret so that his prospects at the school would not be blighted; Heloise would come back to her home in Paris, and Abelard would find lodging elsewhere. Fulbert agreed, but when Heloise—leaving her baby son in the care of Abelard’s family—returned to live in her uncle’s house, Fulbert made her life a misery. “In his exasperation,” Abelard records, “Fulbert heaped abuse on her. . . . As soon as I discovered this I removed her to a convent of nuns . . . near Paris.”

The convent was a way station, a place for Heloise to remain safe while Abelard could figure out his next move; but convents were the traditional refuge of wives whose husbands had repudiated them, and Fulbert used the move as an excuse to take revenge. He sent hired thugs to Abelard’s lodgings in the middle of the night. They pinned the schoolmaster down, and castrated him. “Next morning,” Abelard writes, “the whole city gathered before my house, and . . . tormented me with their unbearable weeping and wailing.”
³

Probably the real crowd was smaller than in Abelard’s recollections, but he was a popular teacher, and the attack was a nine-day wonder. When the fuss had died down, both Abelard and Heloise entered monastic orders, he in the abbey of St. Denis near Paris, she taking orders at the convent of Argenteuil, some twenty-five miles away. Over the next two decades they saw each other perhaps twice; but they wrote letters constantly, their marriage held together only by words.

At St. Denis, Abelard continued to study and teach, applying Greek logic to the doctrines of the Church. The first version of his
Theologia
argued that Plato’s philosophy of a “world soul” was actually a reference to the Holy Spirit; that through logic, any man could grasp the essence of the Trinity; that scripture was
involucrum
, inherently difficult and figurative, “fruitfully obscure” in a way that forced readers to use reason and dialectic as they wrestled with the meaning.
⁴