Stephen of Pisa (also Stephen of Antioch, Stephen the Philosopher) was an Italian translator from Arabic active in Antioch and Southern Italy in the first part of the twelfth century.
He was responsible for the translation of works of Islamic science, in particular medical works of Hali Abbas (the al-Kitab al-Maliki, by Ali Abbas al-Majusi), translated around 1127 into Latin as Liber regalis dispositionis.[1][2] This was the first full translation, the earlier translation by Constantine the African as the Pantegni being partial.[citation needed]
It is believed that he was also a translator at about the same time of Ptolemy's Almagest, for a manuscript now in Dresden, and the author or translator of the Liber Mamonis, a discussion of the Ptolemaic cosmological system using Arabic knowledge, calling for it to replace the ideas of Macrobius then current in the Latin world.[3]
↑ Charles Burnett, The Transmission of Arabic Astronomy via Antioch and Pisa, in J.P. Hogendijk and A.I. Sabra (eds), The Enterprise of Science in Islam: New Perspectives. MIT Press, 2003. (pp. 23-51)
Herman of Carinthia, also Hermannus Sclavus, Hermannus Dalmata, or Secundus, was a Medieval Carinthian Slavic philosopher, astronomer, astrologer, mathematician, translator and author.
Gerard of Cremona was an Italian translator of scientific books from Arabic into Latin. He worked in Toledo, Kingdom of Castile and obtained the Arabic books in the libraries at Toledo. Some of the books had been originally written in Greek and, although well known in Byzantine Constantinople and Greece at the time, were unavailable in Greek or Latin in Western Europe. Gerard of Cremona is the most important translator among the Toledo School of Translators who invigorated Western medieval Europe in the twelfth century by transmitting the Arabs' and ancient Greeks' knowledge in astronomy, medicine and other sciences, by making the knowledge available in Latin. One of Gerard's most famous translations is of Ptolemy's Almagest from Arabic texts found in Toledo.
The House of Wisdom, also known as the Grand Library of Baghdad, refers to either a major Abbasid public academy and intellectual center in Baghdad or to a large private library belonging to the Abbasid Caliphs during the Islamic Golden Age. The House of Wisdom is the subject of an active dispute over its functions and existence as a formal academy, an issue complicated by a lack of physical evidence following the collapse of the Abbasid Caliphate and a reliance on corroboration of literary sources to construct a narrative. The House of Wisdom was founded either as a library for the collections of the Caliph Harun al-Rashid in the late 8th century or was a private collection created by Al-Mansur to house rare books and collections of poetry in both Arabic and Persian.
Constantine the African was a physician who lived in the 11th century. The first part of his life was spent in North Africa and the rest in Italy. He first arrived in Italy in the coastal town of Salerno, home of the Schola Medica Salernitana, where his work attracted attention from the local Lombard and Norman rulers. Constantine then became a Benedictine monk, living the last decades of his life at the abbey of Monte Cassino.
Pseudo-Geber refers to a corpus of Latin alchemical writing dated to the late 13th and early 14th centuries, attributed to Geber (Jābir ibn Hayyān), an early alchemist of the Islamic Golden Age. The most important work of the corpus is Summa perfectionis magisterii, likely written slightly before 1310, whose actual author has sometimes been identified as Paul of Taranto. The work was influential in the domain of alchemy and metallurgy in late medieval Europe.
Abu Ma'shar, Latinized as Albumasar, was an early Persian Muslim astrologer, thought to be the greatest astrologer of the Abbasid court in Baghdad. While he was not a major innovator, his practical manuals for training astrologers profoundly influenced Muslim intellectual history and, through translations, that of western Europe and Byzantium.
The Secretum or Secreta Secretorum, also known as the Sirr al-Asrar, is a pseudo-Aristotelian treatise which purports to be a letter from Aristotle to his student Alexander the Great on an encyclopedic range of topics, including statecraft, ethics, physiognomy, astrology, alchemy, magic, and medicine. The earliest extant editions claim to be based on a 9th-century Arabic translation of a Syriac translation of the lost Greek original. Modern scholarship finds it likely to have been a 10th-century work composed in Arabic. Translated into Latin in the mid-12th century, it was influential among European intellectuals during the High Middle Ages.
Mā Shā’ Allāh ibn Athari was an eighth-century Persian Jewish astrologer, astronomer, and mathematician. Originally from Khorasan he lived in Basra during the reigns of al-Manṣūr and al-Ma’mūn, and was among those who introduced astrology and astronomy to Baghdād in the late 8th and early 9th century. The bibliographer al-Nadim in his Fihrist, described him "as virtuous and in his time a leader in the science of jurisprudence, i.e. the science of judgments of the stars". He served as a court astrologer for the Abbasid caliphate, and wrote numerous works on astrology in Arabic. Some Latin translations survive.
Plato Tiburtinus was a 12th-century Italian mathematician, astronomer and translator who lived in Barcelona from 1116 to 1138. He is best known for translating Hebrew and Arabic documents into Latin, and was apparently the first to translate information on the astrolabe from Arabic.
In the history of medicine, "Islamic medicine" is the science of medicine developed in the Middle East, and usually written in Arabic, the lingua franca of Islamic civilization. The term "Islamic medicine" has been objected as inaccurate, since many texts originated from non-Islamic environment, such as Pre-Islamic Persia, Jews or Christian.
Latin translations of the 12th century were spurred by a major search by European scholars for new learning unavailable in western Europe at the time; their search led them to areas of southern Europe, particularly in central Spain and Sicily, which recently had come under Christian rule following their reconquest in the late 11th century. These areas had been under a Muslim rule for considerable time, and still had substantial Arabic-speaking populations to support their search. The combination of Muslim accumulated knowledge, substantial numbers of Arabic-speaking scholars, and the new Christian rulers made these areas intellectually attractive, as well as culturally and politically accessible to Latin scholars. A typical story is that of Gerard of Cremona, who is said to have made his way to Toledo, well after its reconquest by Christians in 1085, because he
arrived at a knowledge of each part of [philosophy] according to the study of the Latins, nevertheless, because of his love for the Almagest, which he did not find at all amongst the Latins, he made his way to Toledo, where seeing an abundance of books in Arabic on every subject, and pitying the poverty he had experienced among the Latins concerning these subjects, out of his desire to translate he thoroughly learnt the Arabic language....
The Toledo School of Translators is the group of scholars who worked together in the city of Toledo during the 12th and 13th centuries, to translate many of the philosophical and scientific works from Classical Arabic.
Eutychius of Alexandria was the Melkite Patriarch of Alexandria. He is known for being one of the first Christian Egyptian writers to use the Arabic language. His writings include the chronicle Nazm al-Jauhar, also known by its Latin title Eutychii Annales.
Qusta ibn Luqa (820–912) was a Syrian Melkite Christian physician, philosopher, astronomer, mathematician and translator. He was born in Baalbek. Travelling to parts of the Byzantine Empire, he brought back Greek texts and translated them into Arabic.
Calid, Kalid, or King Calid is a legendary figure in alchemy, latterly associated with the historical Khalid ibn Yazid, an Umayyad prince. His name is a medieval Latin transcription of the Arabic name Khalid.
The Liber pantegni is a medieval medical text compiled by Constantinus Africanus prior to 1086. Constantine’s Pantegni has been called “the first fully comprehensive medical text in Latin.” There was, of course, a substantial body of Latin medical writing circulating in western Europe in the early Middle Ages, but the Pantegni was the first text to bring together, in one place, a broad array of learning on anatomy, physiology, and therapeutics. It was dedicated to Abbot Desiderius of Monte Cassino, before he became Pope Victor III in 1086. In 2010, a manuscript at the Hague known to scholars since the early 20th century, but little studied, was recognized as being the earliest copy of the Pantegni, made at Monte Cassino under Constantine's supervision.
The transmission of the Greek Classics to Latin Western Europe during the Middle Ages was a key factor in the development of intellectual life in Western Europe. Interest in Greek texts and their availability was scarce in the Latin West during the earlier Middle Ages, but as traffic to the East increased, so did Western scholarship.
During the high medieval period, the Islamic world was at its cultural peak, supplying information and ideas to Europe, via Al-Andalus, Sicily and the Crusader kingdoms in the Levant. These included Latin translations of the Greek Classics and of Arabic texts in astronomy, mathematics, science, and medicine. Translation of Arabic philosophical texts into Latin "led to the transformation of almost all philosophical disciplines in the medieval Latin world", with a particularly strong influence of Muslim philosophers being felt in natural philosophy, psychology and metaphysics. Other contributions included technological and scientific innovations via the Silk Road, including Chinese inventions such as paper and gunpowder.
The Graeco-Arabic translation movement was a large, well-funded, and sustained effort responsible for translating a significant volume of secular Greek texts into Arabic. The translation movement took place in Baghdad from the mid-eighth century to the late tenth century.
The Book of the Composition of Alchemy is generally considered to be the first translation of an Arabic work on alchemy into Latin, completed on 11 February 1144 by the English Arabist Robert of Chester. It contains a dialogue between the semi-legendary Byzantine monk Morienus and the Umayyad prince Khalid ibn Yazid. The popularity of the work among later alchemists is shown by the fact that it has been preserved in many manuscripts and that it has been printed and translated into vernacular languages several times since the sixteenth century.
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