The House of Wisdom:
How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization
How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization
By
Jonathan Lyons
Jonathan Lyons
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The remarkable story of how Medieval Arab scholars preserved ancient learning and made dazzling advances in science - and how itinerant European scholars brought this lost wisdom back to the West
For centuries following the fall of Rome, Western Europe was a benighted backwater, a world of subsistence farming, minimal literacy, and violent conflict.
Meanwhile Arab culture was thriving, dazzling those Europeans fortunate enough to visit cities like Baghdad or Antioch. There, philosophers, mathematicians, and astronomers were steadily advancing the frontiers of knowledge, as well as keeping alive the works of Plato and Aristotle. When the best libraries in Europe held several dozen books, Baghdad's great library, The House of Wisdom, housed four hundred thousand. Jonathan Lyons shows just how much "Western" ideas owe to the Golden Age of Arab civilization.
Even while their countrymen waged bloody Crusades against Muslims, a handful of intrepid Christian scholars, hungry for knowledge, traveled East and returned with priceless jewels of science, medicine, and philosophy that laid the foundation for the Renaissance. In this brilliant, evocative book Jonathan Lyons reveals the story of how Europe drank from the well of Muslim learning.
Reviews for House of Wisdom
"Sophisticated and thoughtful...In The House of Wisdom, Jonathan Lyons shapes his narrative around the travels of the little-known but extraordinary Adelard of Bath, an English monk who traveled to the East in the early 12th century and learned Arabic well enough to translate mathematical treatises into English.... Mr. Lyons's narrative is vivid and elegant."
—Eric Ormsby, Wall Street Journal. Read full review.
“Dust will never gather on Jonathan Lyons' lively new book of medieval history... Lyons tells his multilayered story deftly, forsaking the tyranny of chronology to flesh out ideas and personalities.”
—Stephen O’Shea, Los Angeles Times Book Review Read full review. This review picked up by Baltimore Times
"This is a refreshing book, one that discovers, or rediscovers, common ground between Islam and Christendom, a historical survey that reminds us that civilizations can converse as well as clash."
—Robert Cremins, Houston Chronicle. Read full review.
“Lively and well researched, the book clarifies how Arabic books, ideas, and knowledge were found and brought back to Europe to help shape Western ideas. With a list of significant events and leading figures; highly recommended for general readers.”
– Library Journal. Read full review.
"The House of Wisdom presents complex, fascinating historical processes with a clarity that makes for compelling reading, as the author provides insight into parallel, and at times intersecting, intellectual and cultural histories."
—History Book Club. See site review.
“The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization is a 320-page treasure trove of information for the uninitiated that packs a powerful punch of science, history, geography, politics and general knowledge at a time when so much disinformation about the Arab world is swirling around in various media.”
— Magda Abu-Fadil, Huffington Post Read post.
"Jonathan Lyons tells the story of the House of Wisdom, the caliphs who supported it and the people who worked there, at a riveting, breakneck pace."
—Times (UK) Read review.
"Former Reuters editor and foreign correspondent Lyons fashions an accessible study about early Western acquisition of scientific knowledge from the Arab world.
Wading through centuries of anti-Muslim propaganda, Lyons traces how the brilliance of Arab knowledge, brought back by visiting scholars from intellectual centers like Baghdad, Antioch and Cordoba, transformed Western notions of science and philosophy. The Western "recovery" of classical learning, as championed later in the Renaissance, was actually first transmitted by these early Arab giants of learning, many of whom emerged from the Baghdad think tank, translation bureau and book repository called the House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma), built by Caliph al-Mansur in the eighth century.
The Baghdad court linked the triumphs of classical wisdom--especially that of the Greeks--with Persian, Hindu and other traditions, spurring the work of significant Arab thinkers such as al-Khwarizmi, who developed star tables, algebra and the astrolabe; al-Idrisi, who accepted a royal commission by Roger II of once-Muslim Sicily to construct the first comprehensive world's map, The Book of Roger; Avicenna, a Persian philosopher and physician who was an authority on medicine; and Averroes, the Muslim philosopher whose commentaries on Aristotle were a major contribution to Western thought.
Lyons capably delineates the fascinating journey of this knowledge to the West, highlighting a few key figures, including Adelard of Bath, whose years spent in Antioch paid off grandly in bringing forth his translations of Euclid and al-Khwarizmi; and Michael Scot, science adviser and court astrologer to Frederick II, who translated Avicenna and Averroes. Lyons cleverly--though too briefly--ties these early theories to the work of Thomas Aquinas and Copernicus and the subsequent "invention of the West."
Pertinent study that should aid in a better understanding between East and West."
—Kirkus Reviews
Seven years before the earthquake that shook the moral foundations of Crusader Antioch, Adelard surveyed the world around him and pronounced it rotten. His recent studies at the famed French cathedral school at Tours had provided him with the best education of his day. He enjoyed the support and patronage of the powerful bishop of Bath, the French court physician and scholar John de Villula. He practiced the art of hunting with falcons, a sign of his noble rank and the life of leisure it generally afforded. And he was an accomplished musician, who years later still fondly recalled the time he had been invited to play the cithara, a forerunner of the guitar, for the queen.
In short, Adelard of Bath was the model country gentleman. His father, Fastrad, was one of Bishop John's richest tenants and most senior aides, ensuring a life of privilege for his son. The family appears sporadically in official documents of Church and state. The Pipe Rolls, or royal accounts, later list Adelard as the beneficiary of a pension from the revenues of Whiltshire, in southwest England. Still, young Adelard saw little of value in the contemporary world, and he despaired at the state of Western learning in particular. "When I examine the famous writings of the ancients – not all of them, but most – and compare their talents with the knowledge of the moderns, I judge the ancients eloquent, and call the moderns dumb," he proclaimed in the opening line of his coming-of-age essay and first known work, On the Same and the Different.
Adelard's disdain for the "the moderns" was understandable, for the West at the end of the eleventh century was a mess. Daily life staggered under the burden of rampant violence and social instability. Bands of mercenaries, answerable neither to king nor God, prowled the countryside, their commanders' word the only law of the land. Across Europe, primitive farming techniques could no longer keep pace with a growing population, while antiquated inheritance laws left many impoverished and desperate. Violence – inflamed by the weakness of central political authority and uninhibited by the tenuous moral grip of the Catholic Church – was the currency of the day. As Pope Urban had acknowledged at Clermont when he called the First Crusade, religious leaders were helpless to halt the chaos across the continent. The best the Church could do was to redirect its flock's baser nature against the infidels to the East.
Not even Adelard's remote corner of England was immune to the troubles. It was just two decades since the Norman Conquest, and political and social strife still plagued the land. The uneasy relationship – for centuries punctuated by bouts of armed conflict – between what today comprise the distinct nations of England and France was a regular feature of late medieval life. At the same time, political, cultural, and personal ties ran deep, and so it was not surprising that Adelard could pursue higher education in Tours and that many leading officials and courtiers, like Bishop John, hailed from the European mainland. In 1086, as a young child, Adelard had seen his native West Country town of Bath, including its once-proud abbey of black-robed monks, almost burned to the ground during an uprising against the heir to the throne, William the Red. The rebels had hoped to secure the rule of William's brother, Robert of Normandy, but their bid for power ended in bloody failure and considerable destruction. Robert, eldest son of William the Conqueror, later died a royal prisoner.
Things were little better inside the elite cathedral schools. The chaos and disorder that swept in with the barbarian invasions of the western Roman Empire, beginning in the fourth century AD, had just about destroyed formal education and the perpetuation of classical knowledge. The Muslim conquests three hundred years later sealed the West's isolation by choking off easy access to the Byzantine Christians based in far-off Constantinople, where some traces of the Greek intellectual tradition could still be found. The wonders of classical learning were all but forgotten, or at the best pushed to the extreme margins of European consciousness. Invaluable texts were lost through inattention, destroyed by the illiterate hordes, or simply rendered unintelligible by the general ignorance of would-be scholars or simply by the lost ability to read Greek. The aristocracy of the Roman Empire read the Greek masters in the original, so there was no need at the time for Latin translations of the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, the engineering wonders of Archimedes, or the geometry of Euclid. The wholesale disappearance of Greek as the language of learning meant centuries of knowledge virtually vanished from the collective mind of Latin-speaking Europe.
There were a few outposts – scattered monasteries in Ireland, northern England, Catalonia, and southern Italy – where the monks labored to keep the classical traditions alive. Yet the results were meager in comparison to the heights once scaled by the Greeks, or to the new and exciting work being carried out in the Arab world. At the West's leading center of mathematical studies, the cathedral school of Laon, the best minds of Adelard's day had no grasp of the use of zero. The masters at Laon taught the latest techniques employed by King Henry I, who ruled both England and Normandy in the early twelfth century, to manage his treasury. These included the use of a special tablecloth, marked out in rows and columns like a chessboard, and based on the principles of the abacus which had reached France from Arab Spain some years before. The cloth was known as the scaccarium, Latin for chessboard, and is the origin of the English term for the treasury, "the Exchequer." Despite the importance of this royal mission, the standard of learning at Laon remained very low; one contemporary textbook reveals consistent errors in even the most basic calculations.
More vexing than sloppy royal accounting was the inability to measure the hours of the day or keep the calendar. Even by the sleepy standards of medieval Christendom, time was a serious business, linked as it was with the pursuit of heavenly salvation. The Rule of St. Benedict, which governed tens of thousands of monasteries from the sixth century onwards, required eight sets of prayers at specific times every twenty-four hours. The practice was based on a reading of two verses in Psalm 119: "Seven times a day I praise thee" and "At midnight I rise to give thee thanks." This was relatively simple during the day, when the changing position of the sun could provide a rough guide to the hour, but at night the monks of the Latin West were left literally in the darkness of their own ignorance.
Excerpted from "The House of Wisdom" by Jonathan Lyons. Copyright © 2009 by Jonathan Lyons
online.wsj.com
For centuries following the fall of Rome, Western Europe was a benighted backwater, a world of subsistence farming, minimal literacy, and violent conflict.
Meanwhile Arab culture was thriving, dazzling those Europeans fortunate enough to visit cities like Baghdad or Antioch. There, philosophers, mathematicians, and astronomers were steadily advancing the frontiers of knowledge, as well as keeping alive the works of Plato and Aristotle. When the best libraries in Europe held several dozen books, Baghdad's great library, The House of Wisdom, housed four hundred thousand. Jonathan Lyons shows just how much "Western" ideas owe to the Golden Age of Arab civilization.
Even while their countrymen waged bloody Crusades against Muslims, a handful of intrepid Christian scholars, hungry for knowledge, traveled East and returned with priceless jewels of science, medicine, and philosophy that laid the foundation for the Renaissance. In this brilliant, evocative book Jonathan Lyons reveals the story of how Europe drank from the well of Muslim learning.
Reviews for House of Wisdom
"Sophisticated and thoughtful...In The House of Wisdom, Jonathan Lyons shapes his narrative around the travels of the little-known but extraordinary Adelard of Bath, an English monk who traveled to the East in the early 12th century and learned Arabic well enough to translate mathematical treatises into English.... Mr. Lyons's narrative is vivid and elegant."
—Eric Ormsby, Wall Street Journal. Read full review.
“Dust will never gather on Jonathan Lyons' lively new book of medieval history... Lyons tells his multilayered story deftly, forsaking the tyranny of chronology to flesh out ideas and personalities.”
—Stephen O’Shea, Los Angeles Times Book Review Read full review. This review picked up by Baltimore Times
"This is a refreshing book, one that discovers, or rediscovers, common ground between Islam and Christendom, a historical survey that reminds us that civilizations can converse as well as clash."
—Robert Cremins, Houston Chronicle. Read full review.
“Lively and well researched, the book clarifies how Arabic books, ideas, and knowledge were found and brought back to Europe to help shape Western ideas. With a list of significant events and leading figures; highly recommended for general readers.”
– Library Journal. Read full review.
"The House of Wisdom presents complex, fascinating historical processes with a clarity that makes for compelling reading, as the author provides insight into parallel, and at times intersecting, intellectual and cultural histories."
—History Book Club. See site review.
“The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization is a 320-page treasure trove of information for the uninitiated that packs a powerful punch of science, history, geography, politics and general knowledge at a time when so much disinformation about the Arab world is swirling around in various media.”
— Magda Abu-Fadil, Huffington Post Read post.
"Jonathan Lyons tells the story of the House of Wisdom, the caliphs who supported it and the people who worked there, at a riveting, breakneck pace."
—Times (UK) Read review.
"Former Reuters editor and foreign correspondent Lyons fashions an accessible study about early Western acquisition of scientific knowledge from the Arab world.
Wading through centuries of anti-Muslim propaganda, Lyons traces how the brilliance of Arab knowledge, brought back by visiting scholars from intellectual centers like Baghdad, Antioch and Cordoba, transformed Western notions of science and philosophy. The Western "recovery" of classical learning, as championed later in the Renaissance, was actually first transmitted by these early Arab giants of learning, many of whom emerged from the Baghdad think tank, translation bureau and book repository called the House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma), built by Caliph al-Mansur in the eighth century.
The Baghdad court linked the triumphs of classical wisdom--especially that of the Greeks--with Persian, Hindu and other traditions, spurring the work of significant Arab thinkers such as al-Khwarizmi, who developed star tables, algebra and the astrolabe; al-Idrisi, who accepted a royal commission by Roger II of once-Muslim Sicily to construct the first comprehensive world's map, The Book of Roger; Avicenna, a Persian philosopher and physician who was an authority on medicine; and Averroes, the Muslim philosopher whose commentaries on Aristotle were a major contribution to Western thought.
Lyons capably delineates the fascinating journey of this knowledge to the West, highlighting a few key figures, including Adelard of Bath, whose years spent in Antioch paid off grandly in bringing forth his translations of Euclid and al-Khwarizmi; and Michael Scot, science adviser and court astrologer to Frederick II, who translated Avicenna and Averroes. Lyons cleverly--though too briefly--ties these early theories to the work of Thomas Aquinas and Copernicus and the subsequent "invention of the West."
Pertinent study that should aid in a better understanding between East and West."
—Kirkus Reviews
EXCERPT
Chapter Two:
The Earth is like a Wheel
Chapter Two:
The Earth is like a Wheel
Seven years before the earthquake that shook the moral foundations of Crusader Antioch, Adelard surveyed the world around him and pronounced it rotten. His recent studies at the famed French cathedral school at Tours had provided him with the best education of his day. He enjoyed the support and patronage of the powerful bishop of Bath, the French court physician and scholar John de Villula. He practiced the art of hunting with falcons, a sign of his noble rank and the life of leisure it generally afforded. And he was an accomplished musician, who years later still fondly recalled the time he had been invited to play the cithara, a forerunner of the guitar, for the queen.
In short, Adelard of Bath was the model country gentleman. His father, Fastrad, was one of Bishop John's richest tenants and most senior aides, ensuring a life of privilege for his son. The family appears sporadically in official documents of Church and state. The Pipe Rolls, or royal accounts, later list Adelard as the beneficiary of a pension from the revenues of Whiltshire, in southwest England. Still, young Adelard saw little of value in the contemporary world, and he despaired at the state of Western learning in particular. "When I examine the famous writings of the ancients – not all of them, but most – and compare their talents with the knowledge of the moderns, I judge the ancients eloquent, and call the moderns dumb," he proclaimed in the opening line of his coming-of-age essay and first known work, On the Same and the Different.
Adelard's disdain for the "the moderns" was understandable, for the West at the end of the eleventh century was a mess. Daily life staggered under the burden of rampant violence and social instability. Bands of mercenaries, answerable neither to king nor God, prowled the countryside, their commanders' word the only law of the land. Across Europe, primitive farming techniques could no longer keep pace with a growing population, while antiquated inheritance laws left many impoverished and desperate. Violence – inflamed by the weakness of central political authority and uninhibited by the tenuous moral grip of the Catholic Church – was the currency of the day. As Pope Urban had acknowledged at Clermont when he called the First Crusade, religious leaders were helpless to halt the chaos across the continent. The best the Church could do was to redirect its flock's baser nature against the infidels to the East.
Not even Adelard's remote corner of England was immune to the troubles. It was just two decades since the Norman Conquest, and political and social strife still plagued the land. The uneasy relationship – for centuries punctuated by bouts of armed conflict – between what today comprise the distinct nations of England and France was a regular feature of late medieval life. At the same time, political, cultural, and personal ties ran deep, and so it was not surprising that Adelard could pursue higher education in Tours and that many leading officials and courtiers, like Bishop John, hailed from the European mainland. In 1086, as a young child, Adelard had seen his native West Country town of Bath, including its once-proud abbey of black-robed monks, almost burned to the ground during an uprising against the heir to the throne, William the Red. The rebels had hoped to secure the rule of William's brother, Robert of Normandy, but their bid for power ended in bloody failure and considerable destruction. Robert, eldest son of William the Conqueror, later died a royal prisoner.
Things were little better inside the elite cathedral schools. The chaos and disorder that swept in with the barbarian invasions of the western Roman Empire, beginning in the fourth century AD, had just about destroyed formal education and the perpetuation of classical knowledge. The Muslim conquests three hundred years later sealed the West's isolation by choking off easy access to the Byzantine Christians based in far-off Constantinople, where some traces of the Greek intellectual tradition could still be found. The wonders of classical learning were all but forgotten, or at the best pushed to the extreme margins of European consciousness. Invaluable texts were lost through inattention, destroyed by the illiterate hordes, or simply rendered unintelligible by the general ignorance of would-be scholars or simply by the lost ability to read Greek. The aristocracy of the Roman Empire read the Greek masters in the original, so there was no need at the time for Latin translations of the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, the engineering wonders of Archimedes, or the geometry of Euclid. The wholesale disappearance of Greek as the language of learning meant centuries of knowledge virtually vanished from the collective mind of Latin-speaking Europe.
There were a few outposts – scattered monasteries in Ireland, northern England, Catalonia, and southern Italy – where the monks labored to keep the classical traditions alive. Yet the results were meager in comparison to the heights once scaled by the Greeks, or to the new and exciting work being carried out in the Arab world. At the West's leading center of mathematical studies, the cathedral school of Laon, the best minds of Adelard's day had no grasp of the use of zero. The masters at Laon taught the latest techniques employed by King Henry I, who ruled both England and Normandy in the early twelfth century, to manage his treasury. These included the use of a special tablecloth, marked out in rows and columns like a chessboard, and based on the principles of the abacus which had reached France from Arab Spain some years before. The cloth was known as the scaccarium, Latin for chessboard, and is the origin of the English term for the treasury, "the Exchequer." Despite the importance of this royal mission, the standard of learning at Laon remained very low; one contemporary textbook reveals consistent errors in even the most basic calculations.
More vexing than sloppy royal accounting was the inability to measure the hours of the day or keep the calendar. Even by the sleepy standards of medieval Christendom, time was a serious business, linked as it was with the pursuit of heavenly salvation. The Rule of St. Benedict, which governed tens of thousands of monasteries from the sixth century onwards, required eight sets of prayers at specific times every twenty-four hours. The practice was based on a reading of two verses in Psalm 119: "Seven times a day I praise thee" and "At midnight I rise to give thee thanks." This was relatively simple during the day, when the changing position of the sun could provide a rough guide to the hour, but at night the monks of the Latin West were left literally in the darkness of their own ignorance.
Excerpted from "The House of Wisdom" by Jonathan Lyons. Copyright © 2009 by Jonathan Lyons
online.wsj.com
