Knowledge In Translation: Global Patterns Of Scientific Exchange, 1000-1800 CE 0822945371, 9780822945376

Table of contents :
Contents......Page 8
Foreword by Charles Burnett......Page 12
Preface......Page 14
Acknowledgments......Page 18
Introduction. Knowledge in Translation / Patrick Manning......Page 20
Part I. Mapping the Earth......Page 36
Chapter 1. The Geographical Concept of the Catalan mappamundi / Katrin Kogman-Appel......Page 38
Chapter 2. Interpretation, Intention, and Impact: Andalusi Arab and Norman Sicilian Examples of Islamo-Christian Cartographic Translation / Karen Pinto......Page 60
Chapter 3. Mountains of the Moon, Lakes in the Sun, and Sinus Gangeticus / Rila Mukherjee......Page 77
Chapter 4. The Global and the Maritime: Divergent Paradigms for Understanding the Role of Translation in the Emergence of Early Modern Science / Robert Batchelor......Page 94
Part II. Constructing Society......Page 110
Chapter 5. Charting China in the Thirteenth-Century World: The First English Translation of Zhu fan zhi and Its Recipients in China in the 1930s / Huei-Ying Kuo......Page 112
Chapter 6. The Case of Bingata: Trafficking Textile Art and Technique across the East China Sea / BuYun Chen......Page 136
Chapter 7. Mapping the Tracks of Yu: Yellow River Statecraft as Science and Technology, 1200–1600 / Ruth Mostern......Page 153
Part III. Advancing Health and Welfare......Page 166
Chapter 8. Animal Remedies in Space and Time: The Case of the Nail of the Great Beast / Irina Podgorny......Page 168
Chapter 9. Translating Heaven: Divination and Political Authority under the Yuan Dynasty / Francesca Fiaschetti......Page 183
Chapter 10. Between Local and Universal: Translating Knowledge in Early Modern Ottoman Plague Treatises / Nükhet Varlık......Page 196
Chapter 11. Transposing Knowledge: Beyond Translation in the Medieval Islamic and Japanese Medical Literary Traditions / M. A. Mujeeb Khan......Page 210
Part IV. Charting the Skies......Page 226
Chapter 12. The Nesting Hypothesis for Planetary Distances and Its Persistence over the Centuries and across Cultures / Bernard R. Goldstein and Giora Hon......Page 228
Chapter 13. Marāgha Observatory: A Star in the Constellation of Eurasian Scientific Translation / Roxann Prazniak......Page 246
Chapter 14. Reading between the Lines: Attitudes toward Arabic Astrology in the Latin Marginalia of Alcabitius’s Introductorius ad magisterium iudiciorum astrorum / Margaret Gaida......Page 263
Chapter 15. The Fourteenth-Century Transformation in China’s Reception of Arabo-Persian Astronomy / Dror Weil......Page 281
Chapter 16. Celestial Navigation: The First Translational Science / Pat Seed......Page 294
Notes......Page 312
Bibliography......Page 384
List of Contributors......Page 440
Index......Page 446

Citation preview

Knowledge in Translation

Knowledge in Translation Global Patterns of Scientific Exchange, 1000–1800 CE

Edited by Patrick Manning & Abigail Owen With a foreword by Charles Burnett University of Pittsburgh Press

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260 Copyright © 2018, University of Pittsburgh Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-4537-6 Jacket art: Section from Catalan mappamundi, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. Esp. 30, Majorca, ca. 1375. Jacket design by Alex Wolfe

In memory of Adam McKeown

CONTENTS

Foreword by Charles Burnett Preface Acknowledgments Introduction. Knowledge in Translation Patrick Manning

xi xiii xvii

1

PART I. MAPPING THE EARTH Chapter 1. The Geographical Concept of the Catalan mappamundi Katrin Kogman-Appel

19

Chapter 2. Interpretation, Intention, and Impact: Andalusi Arab and Norman Sicilian Examples of Islamo-Christian Cartographic Translation Karen Pinto

41

Chapter 3. Mountains of the Moon, Lakes in the Sun, and Sinus Gangeticus Rila Mukherjee 58 Chapter 4. The Global and the Maritime: Divergent Paradigms for Understanding the Role of Translation in the Emergence of Early Modern Science Robert Batchelor

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CONTENTS

PART II. CONSTRUCTING SOCIETY Chapter 5. Charting China in the Thirteenth-Century World: The First English Translation of Zhu fan zhi and Its Recipients in China in the 1930s Huei-Ying Kuo

93

Chapter 6. The Case of Bingata: Trafficking Textile Art and Technique across the East China Sea BuYun Chen

117

Chapter 7. Mapping the Tracks of Yu: Yellow River Statecraft as Science and Technology, 1200–1600 Ruth Mostern

134

PART III. ADVANCING HEALTH AND WELFARE Chapter 8. Animal Remedies in Space and Time: The Case of the Nail of the Great Beast Irina Podgorny

149

Chapter 9. Translating Heaven: Divination and Political Authority under the Yuan Dynasty Francesca Fiaschetti

164

Chapter 10. Between Local and Universal: Translating Knowledge in Early Modern Ottoman Plague Treatises Nükhet Varlık

177

Chapter 11. Transposing Knowledge: Beyond Translation in the Medieval Islamic and Japanese Medical Literary Traditions M. A. Mujeeb Khan

191

PART IV. CHARTING THE SKIES Chapter 12. The Nesting Hypothesis for Planetary Distances and Its Persistence over the Centuries and across Cultures Bernard R. Goldstein and Giora Hon

209

CONTENTS

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Chapter 13. Marāgha Observatory: A Star in the Constellation of Eurasian Scientific Translation Roxann Prazniak

227

Chapter 14. Reading between the Lines: Attitudes toward Arabic Astrology in the Latin Marginalia of Alcabitius’s Introductorius ad magisterium iudiciorum astrorum Margaret Gaida

244

Chapter 15. The Fourteenth-Century Transformation in China’s Reception of Arabo-Persian Astronomy Dror Weil

262

Chapter 16. Celestial Navigation: The First Translational Science Pat Seed

275

Notes Bibliography List of Contributors Index

293 365 421 427

FOREWORD

Translation lies at the heart of communication, understanding, and compassion, between different language cultures, communities, and individuals. Translation of scientific works, in turn, has furthered scientific advancement and spread knowledge in ever-widening circles until the rise of modern universal science. The chapters in this collection have two overlapping focuses: translation of science and a world perspective. The book is innovative in looking beyond the integrated tradition of Western science (which includes the science of the Mediterranean, Northern Europe, and the Middle East, and the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions). India and China had two-way connections with this tradition, with Sanskrit works being translated into Middle Persian and Arabic in the eighth century and texts traveling in the reverse direction with the spread of Islam into the Indian subcontinent from the late tenth century onward, while texts were interchanged between Iran and China, especially between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries within the Mongol Empire. The New World became part of the orb of Western (now becoming “universal”) science from the time of Columbus. Knowledge in Translation considers some aspects of this emerging tradition, as well as some important local and perhaps lesser-known traditions: among them, the transmission of works of astronomy and mathexi

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matics in Hebrew in medieval Europe, maps as a vehicle of transmission of knowledge, European knowledge of the course of Ganges, and exchange of knowledge about textile weaving between China and the Ryukyu Islands. In one chapter, the very understanding of a concept of a different culture is at issue: namely, that of the Chinese word shi, the power or efficacy of a river. Other chapters consider the resilience of ideas across cultures and centuries, such as that of the universe consisting of concentric, nesting spheres, and the causes of plague. Important are the new ideas introduced by the authors: how mapping from the maritime point of view encourages a global perspective, and how modern biologists’ ideas of “translation” can help our own understanding of any process of extracting scientific knowledge from its original context for use in a different setting. Each chapter in this book makes a unique and original contribution to scholarship. In the early twelfth century, Adelard of Bath said that since not every part of the world was proficient in every branch of the sciences, one had to travel to different parts to gain complete knowledge, for the world was like a body in which the soul exercised different powers in different members (De eodem et diverso, conclusion). In this volume one can see the validity of such a statement, but from the perspective of a much larger world than Adelard could have envisaged. Charles Burnett The Warburg Institute University of London

PREFACE

This volume is an inquiry into the global patterns and global implications of scientific investigation from 1000 to 1800 CE, one that pursues history of science in light of the expanding fields of world and global history. The interest of world historians in history of science can hardly be surprising. Especially in the past twenty years, the overlapping fields of world history and global history have developed rapidly, addressing the whole of human history, but with particular focus on global interconnections of the early modern and modern eras. Key contributions in this era of expanding publication focused on environmental and migration history, supplementing earlier world-historical concentration on civilizational, imperial, and political history. Additional contributions emerged in economic history at the turn of the twenty-first century, especially through comparison of European and Asian centers of economic life. World historians showed interest in technological change though not much in global scientific connections. Social, cultural, and intellectual issues, while they advanced in many fields of historical study during the late twentieth century, did not develop vigorously within world-historical context. Thus, world-historical thinking and research unfolded in uneven fashion, especially because of the widely ranging topics of interest. Nevertheless, the desire for comprehensive and

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systemic approaches to the past inevitably brought globalists to the history of science. The World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh opened in 2008 as a center for research, institutional development, and teaching in world history. It benefited from its establishment within a department of history with a strong tradition in social history and benefited further from proximity to the university’s well-known Department of History and Philosophy of Science and its associated Center for Philosophy of Science. Within a year of its establishment, the World History Center came to be a partner in a publication initiative with the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and the University of Pittsburgh Press to synchronize the publishing activity of the press with key strengths of the university. The full initiative, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, has resulted in collaborations and activities that are supporting the press’s efforts to expand its publishing program in the history of science. It has allowed for the employment of a new acquiring editor at the press, three postdoctoral fellows and two distinguished lecturers hosted by the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, and three conferences organized by the World History Center, supported by the employment of three postdoctoral fellows serving as co-organizers of the conferences and coeditors of the resulting volumes. For the World History Center, this was an exciting opportunity. World history was already developing subfields in the study of empire, migration, and environment. Here was the possibility of developing a subfield in world history of science. The hope was to articulate the study of science (and technology) within world history and to identify global perspectives in the history of science. The center’s proposal for the three conferences ranged fairly widely across time and topic. The first conference took place in May 2012 under the title “Linnaean Worlds: Global Scientific Practice during the Great Divergence,” codirected by Patrick Manning and Daniel Rood, which resulted in the publication of Global Scientific Practice in an Age of Revolutions, 1750–1850 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). A second conference took place in May 2014 under the title “The Life Sciences after World War II,” codirected by Mat Savelli and Patrick Manning, which resulted in the publication of Global Transformations in the Life Sciences, 1945–1980 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018). A third conference, “Found in Translation: World History of Science, 1200–1600 CE,” on which the present book is based, took place in October 2015, codirected by Abigail Owen and Patrick

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Manning. Each symposium gathered a range of junior and senior scholars with background both in history of science and global approaches, with the intention of exploring in further detail the global interactions in expansion of scientific knowledge. In the call for papers for the 2015 conference, we asked for submissions on studies addressing sciences, exact or applied, uniting scientific insights and cultures of knowledge across linguistic or faith communities of the period 1200–1600. We sought contributions highlighting key moments of transmission, translation, and critical interpretation across linguistic and faith communities, or across boundaries of shared practice, or shared knowledge about the natural world. The contributions met these criteria, also expanding the temporal frame of this collection to 1000–1800 CE.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We express our appreciation to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for supporting the collaboration at the University of Pittsburgh between the World History Center, the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, and the University of Pittsburgh Press to publish innovative studies in history of science. We express our thanks to the faculty and staff of the World History Center, notably its former administrator, Katie Jones, for support of the conference and postconference activities in support of this volume. We express our thanks to members of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, especially to James Lennox for analytical insights and logistical support. And we express deep appreciation to our colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh Press, who have guided us expertly through each stage of the publication project, and particularly for the editorial work in this volume. Peter Kracht served as director of the press and Abby Collier, senior acquisitions editor, has conducted the editorial task with both substantive knowledge and editorial skill.

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Introduction Knowledge in Translation Patrick Manning

The chapters in this book explore the exchanges of knowledge about the natural world during the early and middle years of the second millennium CE. Our purpose in this exploration is to combine the approaches of history of science and world history to these materials. The authors and editors find that, when considered together, their explorations confirm that cosmopolitan networks of scholarly knowledge existed centuries ago. These networks linked the regions of the world in which literacy was well established; they can be seen as having laid the groundwork for what eventually became known as scientific knowledge. Exchanges in knowledge persisted across Eurasia and beyond, despite inherent and serious difficulties in communication. The specific obstacle to communication on which we focus is that of language—the distinctiveness and multiplicity of languages, and the need to surmount linguistic obstacles through the art of translation. We explore the process and the results of translation as an essential element of the preservation and expansion of scientific knowledge.1 Of course, we acknowledge that the barrier of language was only one of the limits on scholarly communication: physical, social, cultural, and temporal barriers also had to be overcome. Physical obstacles were imposed by great distances and the need to cross mountains, deserts, and oceans; sociopolitical obstacles arose from the limits on 1

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movement sometimes imposed by states; cultural limits emerged from the varying styles of life among societies. Temporal obstacles centered on the long time periods that sometimes separated authors from readers. Yet the obstacles to communication were overcome, one by one. The chapters describing these writings reveal spatial connections across most lands of the Eastern Hemisphere and encompass some regions of the Western Hemisphere. Equally, the contributions to this volume reveal deep temporal connections, as the authors refer to writings across the second millennium and reach into the Ptolemaic times of the first millennium and even to earlier times of the Han dynasty and Classical Greece. Further, the chapters show linkages among various topics and connections at social scales from individual relations to ties at the civilizational level. Nevertheless, we argue—to put it strongly—that it was the act of translation that did the most to overcome all other obstacles. It was through the linguistic formulation in the mind of the translator that space, time, and cultural difference could be overcome to enable the steady development of widely dispersed funds of knowledge. The translations in which we are interested are those in which the authors and readers seek information on the nature and functioning of the natural world—on science, as we would say today.2 Translation, as a framework for study of the history of science, can be seen to encompass other frameworks. That is, the study of translation can be applied equally to the medieval and early modern eras; it applies to translations within contiguous spaces as well as those reaching to languages based in distant regions. Further, the issue of translation is present no matter what the topic under discussion; it goes beyond the written text to address the spoken word. The role of translation in cross-cultural communication, and our study of that role, may highlight key moments of transmission, insight, and critical interpretation across linguistic and faith communities, or across boundaries of shared practice, or shared knowledge about the natural world. Translation arguably goes beyond achieving equivalence from language to language, and adds value. It brings new or revised texts for the destination language, potential recognition of accomplishment for the source language and culture, and valuable debate within the destination language, as new ideas are compared with existing ideas. As Scott Montgomery argues, “In the history of knowledge, the power of translation is commensurate with the power of the word.”3 The history of science has been deeply involved in translation but, with exceptions such as that of Montgomery, the literature has tended to address

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translation more in descriptive than analytical terms. Studies in world history, despite their attention to connections among many cultural and linguistic groups, have not commonly addressed the question of translation explicitly. The authors in this volume—literate in languages including Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Minnan, Ottoman, Persian, and Spanish—explore the role of translation in science through varying analytical frames. Thus, we are analyzing translation explicitly, yet through the varying perspectives associated with the crossing of boundaries in language and framework. We find that translation is not a single process but a variety of means for transferring or linking knowledge from one community to another. Our results yield multiple situations for translation and multiple dynamics in the transmission of knowledge. The world of the second millennium CE was multilingual. In small communities and with interconnection through trade and migration, it was common for people to speak different languages with varying levels of fluency. But to know languages through their written expression, and to know them at roughly parallel levels of expertise in order to translate from one to another, was a highly specialized requirement. Completing the task of translation required that the translator be knowledgeable in at least two languages and also in the discipline under study. Such a task, always requiring effort, was all the more difficult in the era before dictionaries were readily available. Even then, there inevitably remained the problem of untranslatable terms and concepts—terms for which one had no way to be sure that there were equivalent meanings in any two languages. Skilled translators, linking not just two texts but two social situations out of which the texts arose, had to decide what degree of specificity to use in linking the characteristics of the culture expressed in one language with that expressed in another. Further, the translation of works from times long past raised the same difficulty to a higher degree, in that there was no direct way for the translator to experience both social situations. Objectives and Organization Our work begins with a principal focus—translation as a key element in the exchange of knowledge and the construction of scientific inquiry—and peers into the complexities of this issue across fields of knowledge, a wide geographical range, and a long time frame. It is our expectation that the results of this collaborative exploration will not only reveal details about processes of translation but also suggest wider interpretive perspectives

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on the history of science. Each of the four parts of the book focuses on translation in a selected realm of knowledge across a range of time and space. The studies extend from the tenth to the nineteenth centuries; they center on Eurasia from Pacific to Atlantic but also address Africa and the Americas. Part I, “Mapping the Earth,” includes four cartographical studies relying on both maps and texts, each ranging across linguistic as well as geographic boundaries. In Part II, “Constructing Society,” two studies address material construction—the engineering of waterways and the assembly of the elements of textiles—and a third explores the conceptual and administrative construction of empire. Part III, “Advancing Health and Welfare,” presents four studies ranging from physical health through medicine and materia medica to the search for individual and collective welfare through divination. Part IV, “Charting the Skies,” includes five studies of astronomy, addressing efforts to calculate the distances of planets, comprehensive astronomical observation, applying astronomy to human welfare through astrology, exchanging astronomic texts, and using the sun and the moon as tools in navigation. Manuscript texts are central to the analysis in each chapter, but variations in material culture and conceptualization distinguish the four parts from each other. The varying material and conceptual elements include maps and lists of places in part I; creation of textiles, administrative structures, and structures to control water in part II; medication, medical technology, and the search for other factors related to welfare in part III; and sky charts, calendars, and timetables in part IV. In sum, these chapters bring together studies of history of science from the tenth to the nineteenth centuries CE, addressing connections among widely ranging sociogeographic terrains, and emphasizing perspectives drawn from the literatures in history of science and world history. The analytical focus on translation and its complexities provides the basis for our study of processes and trajectories in the exchange of knowledge, as they contributed to preservation and expansion of scientific study. Global Patterns in Scientific Exchange What was the global trajectory of scientific knowledge from 1000 to 1800, by field and in general? What is the appropriate summary of qualitative and quantitative change in scientific knowledge as it expanded, contracted, and transformed in its nature, its location, and its implications for society? Our focus on translation caused us to give particular attention to the specific dynamics of exchange of knowledge in various times, places, and

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fields of knowledge. We encounter repeatedly the question of whether there was a sudden acceleration in scientific knowledge in early modern times— either worldwide or in Europe. Rather than offer a general response to this question, we seek to contribute on a more specific level: we describe and analyze the varying dynamics of knowledge exchange over a millennium. We expect that articulation of the varying dynamics and consequences of knowledge exchange will contribute positively to the resolution of the larger issue. Recent summary statements on the evolution of scientific study, as expressed in the collective Cambridge histories of the fields of history of science and world history, offer a mix of parallels and contrasts. For medieval history of science, an authoritative overview concludes by invoking “the growing awareness of cross-cultural interaction in the history of medieval science.”4 A parallel survey of history of science for the succeeding early modern period, in contrast, emphasizes innovation and rapid change, though within the narrower spatial limits of Europe: it focuses on the excitement brought to Europe by new discoveries from the distant East and West, and on science as “one particularly dynamic field of innovation in early modern Europe.”5 In the Cambridge World History series, a chapter on science from 500 to 1500 CE argues that from Toledo to Chang’an to Timbuktu, “the spread of science was accomplished through books, artefacts and, above all, through the mobility of practitioners.”6 The volume on the succeeding period, focusing on the nurturing of global connections, includes a chapter on technology but none on science: the omission of any focus on scientific advance in this era is remarkable.7 These surveys present readers with contrasting approaches to medieval and early modern science in both literatures: in history of science, the focus shifts from broad and expanding exchange of knowledge to a regionally focused and productive acceleration; in the world history literature, emphasis shifts from expanding exchange of knowledge to the influential developments in empire, commerce, and new technology. Each of these transitions may be important in the world history of science. To assist in sorting out these interpretations, one may offer two sets of distinctions. First, these alternative trajectories of scientific change may be labeled as “evolving scientific exchange”—the notion of continuing exchange and fluctuating advance in scientific knowledge, as emphasized by scholars working on the medieval era—and “emergence of innovative science,” as described by scholars for early modern Europe. Second, to address the origins and causes of each sort of change, one may observe that historians

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of science have concentrated on endogenous interpretations, tracing the development of scientific thinking within a community of scientists, either localized or reaching across geographical and cultural boundaries. World historians, in contrast, have interpreted scientific advance with exogenous interpretations, emphasizing the interplay of technology, empire, and political economy as factors that generated scientific advance.8 In this broad discourse, it is notable that historians of science have chosen to back away from the myth of “Scientific Revolution,” in which earlier analysts overstated the originality, the rapidity, and the determinative influence of early modern scientific study in Europe.9 But if we give up on the notion of an essential Scientific Revolution as the turning point in the history of science, how are we to sort out the possible interpretations of scientific change? The notion of the Scientific Revolution suggested to some that science arose at a single inflection point in space and time. Recent work, including the essays in this volume, shows that the interchanges, advances, and losses in scientific knowledge were distributed in a far more complex pattern across space and time. From a world-historical standpoint, we should keep asking when knowledge expanded (by field of knowledge and by type of knowledge within fields); and we should ask where knowledge expanded (by region and by social strata). Patient scholarship, one may hope, will clarify the many regional exchanges and advances in knowledge, and may contribute steadily to clarification of the complex trajectory of scientific knowledge from medieval times to the expanded scientific establishment of the world today. In practice, the chapters in this volume give most emphasis to “evolving scientific exchange,” though they include episodes of “emergence of innovative science.” The chapters give primary attention to endogenous analysis of scientific discourse, though several chapters give attention to exogenous factors of change such as empire and long-distance commerce. This framework may provide a basis for rereading works by George Saliba, Margaret Meserve, and Pamela Long, in which they link the contributions of earlier exchange of knowledge to the emergence of new and innovative science.10 Kenneth Bartlett, in a skillful comparison of the Florentine intellectuals Machiavelli and Guicciardini, shows that the “new” could lead in different and even contradictory directions.11 The historical trajectory of acceleration in scientific knowledge and practice is an empirical question, but it is also a question of historical method and theory. Readers and researchers of today live in the aftermath of a great wave of European political and cultural hegemony. The twentieth-

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century sequence of empire, war, and decolonization has been succeeded by a world in which individuals and societies are greatly unequal but in which power and social recognition are much more widely distributed than in the era of European empire. We now share a global consciousness that appears to be more persistent than the flashes of global vision that arose during earlier centuries in times of war and other moments of great crisis. The scholarship of today is attempting to learn to what degree this global consciousness, when focused on the past, provides us with new and more connected interpretations of history. To complete this reconsideration of the past, scholars must ensure that their tools, fashioned during and perhaps after the era of Eurocentrism, do not distort the view of the period before European hegemony. Literary Theorists and Translation We turn back now to translation as a device for exploring intimate scientific communication, yet also for analyzing large-scale changes in the history of science. Literary theorists have given great attention to translation, and their observations may be helpful to historians of science at this moment.12 Emily Apter proposed a “translation zone” as a space of critical engagement linking minds and texts, a richly liminal area beyond the units of each polity or language community.13 She poses a range of theses for translation studies ranging from “everything is translatable” to “nothing is translatable.” In conclusion, she identifies the role of translation in turning nature into data—a concept of interest in that it suggests that scientific analysis, in a different way, also turns nature into data. This work, like others exploring translation, draws on “The Task of the Translator” by Walter Benjamin (1923), along with his later reconsideration of the topic, including such notions as the “afterlife” that a translation gives to a text.14 David Damrosch sought to demonstrate the application of the framework of world literature to the problem of translation with three extended examples of how the process of translation can expand the analysis and understanding of a text. His examples were a concise work of ancient Egyptian love poetry, the reflections of a thirteenth-century female mystic, and Franz Kafka’s final novel.15 These analyses make clear how the choices of translators contribute to a revealing but rarely definitive analysis of the original text. Apter returned to the problem of translation in 2013 with Against World Literature, in which she traced the twenty-first-century expansion of works in translation studies and world literature, but found the combination to be “too

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pluralistic, too ecumenical,” fearing that courses in translation were being presented as a “humanities lite,” so that “at its very core World Literature seemed oblivious to the Untranslatable.”16 This assertion, apparently brash, fit with a pattern that appeared in many arenas within expanding global studies. That is, the initial work of globalists centered on broadening their perspective and encountering the outer limits of the global, while the succeeding emphasis turned first to identify the specificity of the local within the global and then to explore the interaction and mutual dependence of the local and the global. The academic field of world history, born in an English-only era, has given little formal attention to translation. Translation has been left as a technical issue in the exploration of sources.17 The great debate in the formative years of world history was over Eurocentrism—that is, the claim that the world should be seen, inclusively, as composed of interacting regions rather than as a set of isolated regions sequentially affected by diffusion of influence from Europe. In this debate, world historians drew on Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism—but they focused on interactions in material and ideological arenas, bypassing the commentary in Said on translation and multilingualism.18 In contrast to the world-historical literature, the area-studies literatures in history have given greater attention to translation. Sheldon Pollock, a scholar in Sanskrit language, literature, and history, convincingly adopted the term “cosmopolis” to describe the usage of Sanskrit, from the first century CE, as a literary language from Afghanistan to Java. This literary community, while not unrelated to the conquests of the earlier Mauryan Empire, extended far beyond the empire’s linguistic and political boundaries. Alexander Beecroft adopted the term as part of his typologically fertile review of The Ecology of World Literature, expanding its application broadly in time and space.19 Of Beecroft’s numerous and overlapping instances of cosmopolis, those that can be said to have functioned during the second millennium CE—the time frame of this volume—include the cosmopoleis of Chinese, Persian, Arabic, Greek, Latin, and, arguably, others, including Hebrew. Both authors and readers in each cosmopolis gained access to a wide range of works. Language variety was such that the speech community of most people in each cosmopolis was generally different from the literary language of the cosmopolis. The problem of translation thus arose both within each multilingual cosmopolis and between one cosmopolis and the next—though it is the latter issue that has gained the most attention in translation studies. In sum, the notion of “cosmopolis” appears to

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be a productive addition to analysis within historical and also to literary studies. It provides, for instance, a framework for considering the point that Persian became the intellectual language of the Mongol Empire, and that a Persian cosmopolis remained in effect in South Asia during the Mughal era.20 If we move forward to our own time, we can argue that today’s predominance of English in global communication, both academic and popular, presents a new situation. Yet it is not irrelevant to label this as an “English cosmopolis” and compare it with other examples of cross-cultural communication through a shared language, as in the earlier cases relying on Sanskrit, Chinese, Persian, Latin, French, and others. Knowledge in Movement: Metaphors and Dynamics Historians of science have proposed various metaphors and dynamics for the exchange of knowledge, perhaps seeking to locate the most appropriate term for conveying the communication of scientific information. In these wide-ranging conversations, however, the metaphors and dynamics selected for discussion have not commonly emphasized language or translation. Kapil Raj has gained wide attention for his application of the term “circulation,” in which he seeks “to ground the circulation of knowledge and knowledge-related practices in specific localities.”21 Raj, writing about the era of global empire, carries on the campaign against Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism is surely not vanquished—authors in this volume note instances of texts whose authors have assumed European or Christian scientific work to be inherently superior.22 Fa-ti Fan expresses support for Raj’s emphasis on spaces of circulation of scientific knowledge, preferring it to Bruno Latour’s diffusionist view of centers of calculation. These various terms are less than perfect substitutes for each other, as they involve slightly different dynamics but are also proposed for somewhat different social situations.23 The concept of circulation, thus, has similarities to Peter Galison’s notion of trade in physics (involving exchange among parallel scientific subcultures), and to Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of a contact zone for knowledge linkages in a situation of asymmetrical power.24 Sujit Sivasundaram addresses related questions in methodology, emphasizing the benefits of reading widely and using documents for unexpected purposes: he tells tales of using Scottish missionary sources to reveal perspectives of Tahitians and of using palm-leaf manuscripts from Ceylon as a key to reading European botanical gardens. Sivasundaram, along with others, sees merit in applying Bourdieu’s theory of practice to the exploration of scientific practice.25

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These analytical frameworks, contrasting proposed dynamics of scientific change, suggest that no single image or metaphor will be sufficient to express the range of interactions in the communication of scientific knowledge. It may be that one such image—perhaps “circulation”—will become the most general and best established such term. Nevertheless, a full analysis of scientific change requires that researchers explore other metaphors to understand multiple dynamics and the social situations in which they have unfolded.26 The design of this book, indeed, is to extend the scope of inquiry, exploring the history of science in the context of world history and perhaps other fields. The term “circulation” has been employed in slightly different forms in South Asian and world history, coevolving in each case with the term “connection.”27 Hence, it may be seen as a positive contribution of this book that the authors have articulated a number of alternative such metaphors and dynamics.28 The dynamics of historical change, once identified in general, are applied to historical situations. Comparison of overviews in history of science and world history, as noted above, yields alternative foci in explaining changes in the history of science, especially during the early modern period. Analysis within history of science, commonly, centers on explaining intellectual changes in terms of other intellectual changes.29 World history, with the broader task of explaining “the construction of a global world,” has focused especially on tracing material and political changes, explaining them primarily with shifts in material conditions.30 Indeed, it appears that the field of world history, in sharp contrast to European history, has not yet found a way to place scientific debate and advance as a central factor in explaining “the construction of a global world.” Technology, in contrast, holds a position of importance in narratives of world history—arguably, history of technology is attributed a more influential role in world history than it is in the history of science.31 In general, this type of linkage of fields of historical study provides an opportunity to appeal to a wider range of causal factors in explaining change in any arena of human society. Some of the main shifts in material conditions unfolding at the global level in the second millennium CE were major climate shifts, notably the Medieval Warm Period from the tenth through thirteenth centuries and the succeeding cooling, up to the seventeenth-century low point of the Little Ice Age. The expansion in global maritime voyages brought the Columbian Exchange of animal and plant biota, great expansion in maritime migration and long-distance commerce, global exchanges of new technology, construction of new empires (governed by Europeans, Asians, and Afri-

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cans). Waves of disease—led by the Black Plague of the fourteenth century (and its successors) and by the great decline in Amerindian populations— struck every region. These numerous shifts in global conditions, important in themselves, may also be considered as possible influences on the nature and extent of scientific communication. We end up, therefore, with at least three categories of causal factors to consider in tracing world-historical changes in history of science: dynamics of communication, global material conditions, and the practice of translation.32 Exploring Cases and Dynamics The authors in this volume have used both descriptive and metaphoric terms to propose several overlapping dynamics of the communication of knowledge. I conclude with brief summaries of the topics and dynamics presented in the chapters to come, hoping to convey the analytical richness that can arise from historical interpretations assembled with a focus on translation. Some focus on the perspective of the author or creator, others on the perspective of the reader. In some cases a monarchy may be seen as creator or consumer of knowledge, while in other cases the exchange of knowledge takes place in the realm of civil society. Our chapters open with studies of mapping the Earth. Four chapters convey distinctive dynamics in the production and exchange of maps. Katrin Kogman-Appel considers the circumstances of Elisha Cresques, the creator of the 1375 map known as the Catalan mappamundi. She concludes that Iberian scholars working in Hebrew at that time had access to a particularly wide range of texts and translations in Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin that enabled Cresques to create a map that drew successfully on multiple cartographic traditions and facilitated study in scientific terms. Kogman-Appel thus identified propinquity, in space and culture, as a factor that facilitated advances in analysis and cartographical display. Karen Pinto, also for the western Mediterranean, compares two culturally different mapping traditions—Islamic and medieval European—and demonstrates their interaction. She traces the individual hands of annotations and marginalia in Arabic and Latin on a ninth-century T-O map and on a twelfth-century Arabic cartogeographical manuscript, and seeks to identify the authors of the annotations. In doing so she documents the multidirectional diffusion of cartographic ideas that influenced key figures in the Christian and Muslim Mediterranean and strengthened both the Christian and Muslim cartographic traditions. Pinto uses the term “con-

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vivencia” to describe the cordial relations across confessional lines and the resulting benefits to cartography. Rila Mukherjee traces the advances and regression in European mapping of the Ganges delta from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. Cartographers in northern Europe, working with recently translated maps of Ptolemy, but without the accurate though hidden Indian Ocean maps of Portuguese voyagers, made speculative maps of the Ganges into the eighteenth century. The results, while uneven, reveal the importance of Ptolemy’s conception of the relationship between mountains and rivers in a continental region. In Mukherjee’s view, Ptolemy’s geological theory provided valuable support to cartographers who had to work without the empirical detail of surveys of the Ganges. In a fourth cartographic presentation, Robert Batchelor compares the cartographic approaches of the land-based Ottoman and Safavid empires to the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia with the seventeenth-century Fujianese “Selden Map,” which documents ports and maritime routes traveling outward from East Asian seas. Batchelor emphasizes that “maritime flexibility” and practical “repositories of navigational skill and wayfinding,” in contrast to terrestrial centralism and efforts to create a singular global vision, provided an advantage for maritime maps and argues, “This early modern meeting of traditions gave impetus to a final shift from the quantitative to the mathematical, to use Needham’s terms.” In three chapters on the construction of human society through empire, trade, material culture, and engineering, a similar range of dynamics emerges. Huei-Ying Kuo, exploring a thirteenth-century Chinese manuscript based on commercial and imperial information collected at the port of Quanzhou, analyzes the contradictory twentieth-century interpretations of this text by American translators and Chinese readers. Kuo shows how the readers, in debating terms in the original and the translation, revealed their contending views of Song-era China as a network of commercial stations or as the administration of continental lands. She argues that “ideological shackles” limited the vision of twentieth-century readers. BuYun Chen’s essay enters the realm of material culture in her exploration of “bingata,” a brightly patterned cloth produced on the Ryukyu archipelago. Following Meiji Japan’s annexation of the Ryukyu Kingdom, Tokyo-based Japanese intellectuals traveled to the islands and described bingata as a superlative example of local folk craft. Chen shows that, on the contrary, the “production secret” of bingata resulted from exchanges of knowledge among painters and textile artisans, as well as from the trade in textiles and painting manuals. Such exchange centered on the centuries of

INTRODUCTION

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Ryukyu tradition including tributary relations with Ming and Qing China and artisanal exchange with the port of Fuzhou. In a very different sort of social construction, Ruth Mostern considers the long administrative effort to control flooding of the Yellow River after the initial floods of 1048. Thus she relies on translation in material culture more than on a strictly linguistic translation. As she argues, the governing philosophy of “efficacy,” which called for caution in interfering with nature, remained unchallenged even as it proved ineffective in ending the breaching of levees—as sediment flowed relentlessly downstream from the loess plateau. Four chapters focus on attempts to understand the natural world for purposes of advancing human health and welfare. Irina Podgorny traces the location and linkage of animals that appeared similar—the “great beasts” on every continent, as they were described over several centuries. Observers showed special interest in the hooves and nails of these beasts, especially as they were widely thought to cure epilepsy. She resolves the mystery of the parallels among great beasts by documenting the “scenarios and trading zones” that spread ideas of the pharmaceutical utility of hooves and nails in many cultures over the course of three centuries. Francesca Fiaschetti investigates the place of divination in the Mongol courts, treating divination as a platform for scientific translation. She argues that Mongol rulers sought “centralization and institutionalization” of the processes of divination to help them select the order in which they drew on competing traditions of scientific knowledge. Nükhet Varlık analyzes the circulation of numerous treatises on the diagnosis and treatment of plague, written from the fifteenth century in Ottoman Turkish, Persian, and Urdu, for general audiences. As Varlık notes, “Both the disease itself and the knowledge of it took different forms and meanings in different contexts, as a result of biological, social, and historical factors.” She traces a process of “vernacularization” as authors sought contact with the local conditions of their readers but also wished to be consistent with the universal knowledge of plague. M. A. Mujeeb Khan explores tenth-century medical encyclopedias created in Persia and Japan, tracing their role in the evolving medical literature of each region. Khan focuses on “transposition” rather than translation, defining transposition as the act of appropriating knowledge from one source, with the faithfulness of the excerpting less important than the actual act of transposition. Transposition itself thus served as a form of new knowledge creation, simply by bringing the knowledge (i.e., excerpts, summaries of quotations, etc.) to the new context, both in its reinterpretation through its repositioning in this new context and its isolation from its

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original, larger narrative. Transposition led to quite different trajectories in the evolution of medical encyclopedias in Persia and Japan. We complete the volume with chapters addressing the understanding of the skies. Bernard R. Goldstein and Giora Hon detail the history of a cosmological principle, the nesting hypothesis for planetary distances, from Ptolemy’s Planetary Hypotheses in the second century CE, through its persistence in Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin texts to its decline in the seventeenth century. This hypothesis put the Sun, Moon, and planets in orbs around the Earth at distances deemed to fit almost perfectly so that there are no significant gaps between the orbs of adjacent planets. Goldstein and Hon emphasize that recurring confidence in the nesting hypothesis was enhanced by the often misleading appeal to numerical agreement to confirm a theory. Roxann Prazniak recounts the achievements of the innovative observatory built in the thirteenth century at Marāgha, the initial capital of the Il-Khans. The exchange of information included translating and setting equivalences in calendars throughout the Mongol realm: Prazniak emphasizes the advantages of imperial centralization for the compilation of astronomical information at this scale. Margaret Gaida examines the afterlife of the translation from Arabic to Latin of one of the most popular texts on astrology in the medieval period. Drawing from a pool of over two hundred extant manuscripts of Alcabitius’s Introduction to Astrology, she assesses the marginal comments and annotations of Latin readers to determine their attitudes toward the Arabic astrological tradition. She observes that in approximately thirty copies of the text, ranging from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, scribes continued to employ Arabic technical terms and readers often cited other Arabic astrological authorities in the margins. She concludes that Latin readers held the Arabic astrological tradition in high esteem, and regarded Arabic texts as valuable sources of astrological knowledge for centuries after the translation of the text in the twelfth century. Dror Weil traces the dispatch of Arabo-Persian astronomical texts and their reception, translation, and naturalization in China from the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries. He argues that the fourteenth century, amid the sociopolitical changes that China underwent, saw a transformation in the ways Chinese astronomical institutions accommodated Arabic and Persian knowledge. A project of translation of Arabic and Persian texts replaced the use of original texts and ushered in a new form of East–West intellectual engagement. Pat Seed traces the translation of celestial science into celestial navigation in fifteenth-century Portugal, as the drive of the monarchy to sail to the Indian Ocean led to engaging skilled Jewish math-

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ematicians in performing trigonometric calculations that traced locations of the Sun and the Moon in place of the stars. They put the astrolabe to a new purpose, and made it possible for navigators to measure longitude and latitude anywhere on the seas. Of the numerous and distinctive dynamics of knowledge exchange documented by the authors in this volume, most can be linked (though in varying fashions) to the trajectory of “evolving scientific exchange.” A few highlight rapid change and thus contribute examples to the trajectory of “emergence of innovative science”—including chapters by Kogman-Appel, Prazniak, and Seed. Still other chapters focus on dynamics that point in other directions: Kuo’s “ideological shackles” affect the interpretation of the history of science as much as the past exchange of knowledge under study; Mostern’s attention to the philosophy of “efficacy” argues that an area of intellectual rigidity restrained innovation even in a global center of innovation; and Fiaschetti’s emphasis on divination as a form of knowledge enabled Mongol sovereigns to set priorities in relying on competing bodies of scientific knowledge. Indeed, each of the authors has found a distinctive path for exploration of translation and its logic. They document the conveyance of understandings and misunderstandings, not only across languages but across space, time, and topics—distinguishing the perspectives of author, translator, and reader. The chapters trace many of the paths by which knowledge has been retained, conveyed, updated, and put to new purposes. This volume addresses major issues in processes of scientific exchange and advance during a long era of dramatic change in human society. By combining approaches drawn from history of science and world history, we seek to add to the number of causal factors under consideration, the dynamics of their interaction, and the range of possible consequences of scientific change. We may hope to contribute to an orderly if complex interpretation of the history of science, but we are skeptical that any single model of circulation or connection will integrate these factors smoothly. While our studies are monographic rather than synthetic, certain broad patterns appear in our work and call for additional specification. The studies in this volume indicate that, by the beginning of the second millennium CE, there was already a significant network of communication on knowledge of the natural world, stretching across much of Eurasia and parts of Africa. This network grew in breadth and depth across the centuries, though including regional declines as well as advance. The many moments

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of important discoveries do not yet reveal any one definitive break. From the standpoint of the present, we can be sure that some important processes of acceleration arose. We are not prepared to offer grand hypotheses on the nature of those processes. But we believe that the specific processes of translation and communication presented in these chapters, along with the global framework in which they are presented, can contribute to unraveling the great mystery of scientific advance.

Part I Mapping the Earth

Chapter 1 The Geographical Concept of the Catalan mappamundi Katrin Kogman-Appel

Most medieval cartographic renderings of the world depict the ecumene as circular, and this was true for Western maps as well as those from the Islamic realm. Both cultures tended to stylize the landmasses and the bodies of water into conceptual representations of the known world. The first Western maps designed to provide realistic and accurate representations of coastlines were Italian marine charts of the Mediterranean Basin and the Black Sea, and these apparently began to appear in the second half of the twelft h century.1 The genre, commonly referred to in the literature as “portolan charts,” flourished during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, particularly in Majorca. The famous Catalan world map now in Paris was meant to be such a chart.2 On the left we see the Western part of the ecumene reproduced as a portolan chart. The right half represents Asia in what seems to be an attempt to create the same kind of map, but as there was no tradition of portolan charts of Asia, the results are not as accurate (figure 1.1 [a–h]). The Catalan mappamundi is attributed to a man whom historians of cartography know as Cresques Abraham. Scholars of Hebrew manuscript culture, however, know him as Elisha ben Abraham Cresques, a scribe and an illuminator, who produced one of the most lavish Sefardi manuscripts, commonly known as the “Farhi Bible.”3 Elisha Cresques is a fairly well19

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documented figure. He lived in Majorca from 1325 to 1387, and the world chart is dated to around 1375. Documents in the archives of the Crown of Aragon tell us that he was a man of considerable wealth and a highly appreciated cartographer in the court’s service. He was in fact the only cartographer of his generation to work with the court.4 Thus far scholarship on the Catalan mappamundi has tended to present Cresques’s work as a beautiful artifact, richly embellished as it was intended for a royal collection. Cresques himself was approached as a man of the brush, who relied on earlier work and whose scientific contribution would have been insignificant.5 Elsewhere I have demonstrated that this is a misleading image, and that he was, rather, an erudite scholar with wide intellectual interests.6 As he noted in the colophon of the Farhi Bible, he collected books, and he copied some of them into the codex. In the following pages I offer some thoughts on an additional perspective regarding his intellectual profile with a focus on his knowledge of geography. Elisha Cresques’s map represents a geographical concept that was fairly unusual for its time (figure 1.1a–h). Medieval maps in the mappamundi tradition depicted a circular image of the known world underscoring the perfection of the divine creation and communicating a Weltbild driven by Christian cosmology.7 Portolan charts represented the Mediterranean Basin and the Black Sea based on the geographic and hydrographic knowledge available at the time.8 Elisha Cresques’s project created a dialogue with both approaches, but most notably and unusually portrays the known world in a rectangular shape. This choice was born out of an awareness that the ecumene covered only about a quarter of the earth’s surface—half of the Northern Hemisphere—and the observation that the most successful way to depict it would be as a projection on a rectangular sheet. Moreover, unlike other Western visualizations of the known world, which stretched from Iberia to India, in Elisha Cresques’s map it extends from the Canary Islands to China.9 These considerations raise the question as to what sort of knowledge Elisha Cresques had that led him to develop such a concept, and further, how did he gain that knowledge? With his fellow Majorcan cartographers, he was familiar with the technique for making portolan charts, and he applied that knowledge to the left side of his world chart. What other cartographers did not share with him was the idea of representing the entire ecumene on a rectangular sheet; the awareness that Asia went on beyond India to include China; and an attempt to apply that common method of portolan chart making to the right half of his map.

Figure 1.1 (a–h). Catalan mappamundi, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. Esp. 30, Majorca, ca. 1375.

a

b

c

d

e

f

g

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These observations lead us to ask to what extent Elisha Cresques’s concept may have been indebted to some aspects of the Ptolemaic heritage.10 Claudius Ptolemy (ca. 90–168 CE), a native of Alexandria was the author of several major works relevant to the history of cartography, among them Geographike Hyphegesis (Geographical guidance), commonly referred to as Geographia and Mathematike Syntaxis (Mathematical treatise), known as Almagest. Ptolemy’s work influenced the field in five basic ways: he described the ecumene as extending from Iberia to eastern Asia; he rejected earlier views of the ecumene as an island; he divided the inhabited zone into seven climes; he discussed the coordinates as an aid toward cartographic rendering; and he developed methods of projection of the spherical earth, or rather the inhabited portion of it on a flat rectangular surface by aid of that coordinate grid. Although these concepts had been known as such during the Middle Ages, especially in the Islamic world, it is a wellknown fact that they had only limited influence on actual mapmaking in both the West and the Islamic world. In what follows, I attempt to assess to what extent Elisha Cresques was familiar with these concepts and how he might have come by this knowledge. My observations will show that it was Elisha’s specific place in Iberian and, particularly, Sefardi cultural history that allowed for these and other unusual features and provided him with access to a corpus of knowledge that was available in his vicinity—literally next door—but was apparently less accessible or of less interest to his Christian colleagues in the mapmaking trade. The result is a unique fusion of elements of the Ptolemaic heritage with the practice of portolan chart making. Let me first address very briefly and by way of summary the role the Ptolemaic heritage played in the Middle Ages. Whereas the Almagest was translated into Arabic, Latin, and Hebrew, Western medieval knowledge about the Geographia was limited. Arabic adaptations of the latter had been in existence since the ninth century, but it was only translated into Latin in 1406, so its impact in the medieval West was often considered nonexistent or at best very limited. In fact, it has always been taken for granted that the lack of any familiarity with the practical aspects of Ptolemaic scholarship was the reason that Western cartography was conceptual rather than geographically accurate. This common misconception ignores the fact that despite the existence of Arabic versions of the Geographia, medieval Islamic cartography was likewise conceptual. It also comes from a misjudgment of Western knowledge about the Geographia, recently revisited by Patrick Gautier Dalché.11 Moreover, even though the Geographia was meant as a

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practical guide to mapmaking, there was also a basic outline of the concept in the Almagest. In fact, we shall see that Elisha’s concept did not depend on knowledge of the Geographia; rather, it appears that the conveyance of ideas that guided Elisha toward the construction of his map was more complex. This has not only to do with the (non)availability of the Geographia in the West. The main feature of the latter, the coordinate method, was entirely irrelevant to practitioners of portolan cartographers, who easily would have become aware that in terms of geographic and hydrographic accuracy the technique of portolan charts yielded better results than the Ptolemaic method of coordinates. As I shall argue in what follows, the rather unique attempt of combining the Ptolemaic concept of a rectangular ecumene with the method of portolan chart making did not require knowledge of the Geographia. Knowledge of the basic concept as it was communicated in the Almagest (even if the latter was not explicitly addressed at mapmakers) and several related works would have been sufficient. In the Islamic world, the Geographia circulated among scientists from the ninth century onward.12 No literal translation into Arabic survives, but several works from the tenth century by Muhammad ibn Musa alKhwarizmi and an otherwise unknown scholar by the name of Suhrab paraphrased it or are otherwise based on it. About a century later the astronomical work of Al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham of Basra (d. 1040) reflected great familiarity with the Geographia, even though its main source was the Almagest. Copies of his Kitab fi Hay’at al-‘alam (On the configuration of the world), a general handbook for nonscientists, were to be found throughout the entire Islamic world, including Iberia.13 The Almagest was more widely received. Arabic translations circulated all over the Islamic world, and several other works, paraphrases, abridged versions, and critical assessments were composed by various Arab scientists. A treatise by Ahmad Ibn Muhammad ibn Kathir al-Farghani, active in Persia in the 830s, was among the most widely known of these. A sort of compendium to the study of the Almagest, it critically assesses the Ptolemaic approach to astronomy and points out several scientific drawbacks in that work.14 Ibn al-Haytham of Basra, mentioned above, composed two related texts. One was an abridged version of the Almagest, a short summary that skipped over the technical details included in Ibn al-Haytham’s Configuration of the World, and a critical commentary to the Almagest (Doubts about Ptolemy). Another critique was penned in Al-Andalus by Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Rushd (d. 1198) with an abridged summary of the Almagest.15 This corpus of Ptolemaic literature in Arabic inspired yet

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further works in geography, among them the Book of Curiosities, discovered a few years ago and acquired by the Bodleian Library,16 and Muhammad al-Idrisi’s (d. ca. 1165) description of the known world.17 Both the Book of Curiosities and al-Idrisi’s corpus include cartographic works. As far as Jewish interests in this scholarship were concerned, there is evidence that the Geographia was known among Jews, even though in the Jewish world, too, Ptolemy’s most influential book was the Almagest. Sefardi interest in Greek and Arabic astronomy goes back to the eleventh century, to the work of Abraham bar Hiyya in Barcelona. One of his books, Tsurat ha’arets (The shape of the earth) is an astronomic treatise fostered by Ptolemy’s Almagest and subsequent Islamic works.18 A generation later he was followed by Abraham ibn Ezra (d. 1167), a native of Tudela, at the time still under Islamic rule. Escaping the regime of the Almohads in Iberia, Ibn Ezra later traveled extensively to various places in Europe, and it was during these sojourns outside Iberia that he pursued his writing career. Shlomo Sela recently published an exhaustive study about Ibn Ezra’s familiarity with Ptolemy, whom he defined as his “chief scientific source.” As other Jewish scientists in the Middle East and Iberia, Ibn Ezra was primarily interested in astronomy. Nevertheless, the Geographia is mentioned explicitly in the Latin version of his treatise, the Liber de Rationibus Tabularum, and it is clear that he was familiar with the Ptolemaic system of longitudes and latitudes.19 Revisiting Elisha’s concept in relation to the Ptolemaic geographical notions raises several questions. In the pages that follow, I first say a few words about the ways in which Elisha’s rendering of the ecumene diverged from Western renderings of the known world, on the one hand, and what debt it owes to the Ptolemaic heritage, on the other. The dialogue the chart maintains with these Ptolemaic echoes in the Islamic tradition is at the core of my discussion. The last step of this endeavor is to see in what form this heritage would have been accessible in Elisha Cresques’s immediate cultural milieu. Elisha’s map cuts off the tip of the Indian subcontinent and does not show the source of the Nile, both expected to be near or off the equator. Hence, it reaches from approximately 14 degrees to 16 degrees north of the equator up to Scandinavia and Siberia, and from the Atlantic islands to China. Whereas the Almagest describes the ecumene as reaching from the equator to the polar circle, the Geographia looks further to the south and marks the beginning of the inhabited world at about 16 degrees south of the equator.20 Thus, Elisha followed the extensions given in the Almagest

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and later geographic accounts based on that work, which indicates that his approach to the concept did not depend specifically on knowledge of the Geographia. Perhaps the most unusual aspect of Elisha’s concept is the fact that the ecumene is spread on a rectangular sheet. As noted, in both Western and Islamic culture the preferred shape for a world map was the circle, and very few examples of rectangular world maps have survived from the Middle Ages. Only one such map survives from the medieval West.21 Notwithstanding the much wider dissemination of the Ptolemaic concept among Islamic scientists, rectangular maps were also extremely rare in this realm. Caliph Abu Ja’far Abdullah al-Ma’mun ibn Harun (813–33), who initiated and sponsored much of the early geographic and astronomic scholarship, is said to have obtained a world map, now lost. Nothing particular about its appearance is known, but scholars have suggested that it may have been of a rectangular format.22 Finally, a group of world maps in copies of Muhammad ibn Hawqal’s Description of the Earth (from 977) and associated with the so-called Balkhi School of Islamic cartography (a concept that has recently been questioned) renders the world map not as a circle, but as an oval.23 It has been suggested that this is simply a variation of the Ptolemaic rectangular projection, one of the features that indicates a Ptolemaic influence on Ibn Hawqal.24 The Oxford Book of Curiosities sheds further light on the rectangular concept of mapmaking. Among other cartographic renderings, it includes a schematic rectangular map of the ecumene on a double-page spread, the earliest extant such map from the Middle Ages (figure 1.2.). The fact that it also has a scale, even though there is no hint of coordinates, raises a question as to whether it was conceived with the Ptolemaic method in mind. Whereas the Oxford manuscript as such is not a particularly scientific work, but rather an eclectic compilation of various pieces of information with a particular focus on astrology, the rectangular map may have been modeled after a prototype that belonged to a more scientific arena. The visualization of the tongue-shaped somewhat amorphous landmasses is extremely stylized and follows a conceptualizing method rather than suggesting an interest in geographic accuracy. Still, with reference to the scale and the rectangular shape, Yossef Rapoport and Emilie Savage-Smith do not deny that “mathematically plotted maps” may have been available in eleventh-century Egypt when the Book of Curiosities was compiled there and that the rectangular map in that volume is the outcome of the use of a poorly understood model.25

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Figure 1.2. World Map, Book of Curiosities, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Arab. c. 90, 23v–24r, Egypt, end of the twelfth century.

Al-Idrisi’s map composed in 1154 for Roger II of Sicily was further evidence of an Islamic awareness of the advantages of a rectangular presentation of the ecumene. Judging from a modern composite of the seventy regional maps that accompany al-Idrisi’s treatise, the extension of Roger’s map may have had several features in common with the Ptolemaic map as we know it from the medieval evidence.26 It is not certain that al-Idrisi’s original map was rectangular in shape, but this has been commonly assumed.27 Moreover, in the introduction to his text al-Idrisi explicitly stated that he had made use of Ptolemy’s Geographia.28 As Roger’s map, which was cast in silver, was destroyed in 1161, we are thus left with al-Idrisi’s text, the accompanying seventy regional maps, and the small circular world map; it is conceivable that the regional charts put together might even depict an equivalent of the original silver map.29 Unlike Roger’s map, which was addressed to an audience at the Sicilian court, the text and the captions in the accompanying map drawings were composed in Arabic and their potential influence on Western cartographic practices was limited. However, the text did inspire the works of several thirteenth- and fourteenth-century

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Arab geographers. In these Islamic maps in rectangular shape the ecumene extends beyond India to eastern Asia. Suggesting that the rectangular shape of the Catalan mappamundi and the extension from Iberia to China echo the Ptolemaic geographic concept as it was known in the Islamic world, one is led to ask what Elisha’s immediate sources of inspiration would have been. Did he see a rectangular map extending from Iberia to China? Most likely not. Did he learn about this possibility from texts? If so, what sorts of texts? How much of this concept would have been common knowledge? As noted, the reception of Ptolemaic knowledge was a rather complex matter and much of its transmission took place within the Islamic realm. At the beginning of the twelfth century, particularly in Castile and Italy, translation projects, including works from Arabic into Hebrew, became important vehicles for the conveyance of ideas.30 In the following I shall take a closer look at how these projects and familiarity with Ptolemaic concepts might have influenced Elisha’s work. Some two hundred years before Ptolemy wrote the Almagest and the Geographia, another Greek scientist, Geminos (perhaps of Rhodes) had written as follows: Our ecumene is divided into three parts: Asia, Europe, and Libya. The length of the ecumene is approximately double the width. For this reason, those who draw world maps in proportion draw them on oblong panels so that the length is double the width. Those who draw circular world maps have wandered far from the truth, for the length [of a circular map] is equal to the width, which is not the case in nature. Of necessity, the proportions of the distances are not preserved in the circular world maps, for the inhabited part of the Earth is a certain segment of a sphere having the length the double of the width, which cannot be bounded by a circle.31

During the Middle Ages, Geminos’s Introduction to the Phenomena, originally intended not as a scientific treatise, but as a textbook for students,32 was translated into Arabic and subsequently associated with Ptolemy’s Almagest. In fact, it was occasionally used as an introduction to the Almagest and by some thought to have been authored by Ptolemy himself. Apart from the extension of the ecumene from 16 degrees north of the equator to China and the southern areas of Scandinavia, the mention of the rectangular projection in this text would be a second way to explain to what degree Elisha was aware of the Ptolemaic concept. From the twelfth century on, some of the Ptolemaic scholarship was

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translated into both Latin and Hebrew, and it was the Almagest that aroused most of the interest in Ptolemy. Around 1140 Gerard of Cremona, a Lombard monk, set out for Toledo to gain access to Arabic scientific literature, and particularly to the Almagest. After studying Arabic, Gerard was able to translate the Almagest into Latin. He also issued a Latin version of Geminos’s Introduction attributing it to Ptolemy, following apparently his Arabic model.33 In the middle of the thirteenth century, Moses ibn Tibbon, working for the Angevins in Naples, translated Geminos’s Introduction. As Gerard of Cremona, he seems to have associated it likewise with Ptolemy, as manuscripts usually put it under a heading referring to Ptolemy. The above-quoted section about the image of the earth drawn on a rectangular panel is an almost literal translation.34 A Hebrew version of the Almagest was rendered around the same time by Jacob Anatoli, active at the Hohenstauffen court in Sicily.35 Geminos’s Introduction and Ptolemy’s Almagest were but two out of many treatises of similar interest that were translated into Latin and Hebrew during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Other texts were al-Farghani’s mentioned text dealing with the Almagest,36 and Ibn al-Haytham’s Configuration of the World. Around the same time that al-Farghani’s text was also translated into Hebrew by Jacob Anatoli, no fewer than five different Hebrew versions of Ibn al-Haytham’s treatise were circulated,37 and the thirteenth century saw numerous Hebrew translations of other astronomic materials.38 There was also a Hebrew (but no Latin) version of Ibn Rushd’s critique of Ptolemy.39 As Geminos’s text before it, the Almagest has a chapter on the geography of the earth, and the later treatises followed that lead. They all sketch the Ptolemaic concept as it was described above. However, of all these texts, it is only Geminos’s (and of course Ptolemy’s Geographia with its rather complex reception) that says explicitly that the best way to represent the known world visually in a map is a rectangle and that a circular representation of the ecumene is false. Thus, Elisha would not really have needed a thorough knowledge of the Geographia to create his concept of the ecumene. A careful reading of Geminos’s Introduction to the Phenomena and the geographic chapter of the Almagest would have offered plenty of food for thought. Further features typical of these texts and the concept they describe were relevant for Elisha Cresques’s dealings with the visualization of the southern and the eastern parts of the ecumene. In particular, the partition into climes, the placement of specific landmasses, and the allocation of place names and other geographic features within the climes seem to have

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functioned as aids toward designing the map. A discussion of these goes beyond the framework of this chapter and will appear elsewhere.40 Finally, if this material was available in both Latin and Hebrew, why was it still more likely that it was Elisha who came up with these ideas, rather than his fellow Christian mapmakers? One answer to this question may be the reception of these texts in the Western Christian tradition, on the one hand, and in the Jewish world, on the other. Not much is known about the reception of the Latin translation projects, and the manuscript evidence is rather sparse. As to the twelfth-century translation activity, Olaf Pedersen points out the very limited reception of the Almagest in medieval Europe, and Marie-Thérèse d’Alverny argued these translations were of interest primarily in France and England.41 According to Charles Burnett the translation enterprise remained preeminently in the hands of foreigners, and was an “export commodity,” rather than one for the local community, whose members, for the most part, could not read Latin.42 Burnett also revisits the question of whether or not there was a “school of translators” in Toledo, a school that would have had a cultural impact on the immediate environment, and concludes that in all likelihood there was no such “school.” Rather, he argues, the translations were initiated by the cathedral, which was run predominantly by French bishops. Burnett’s argument relies, among other points, on the fact that the reception of Gerard’s translations took place in France and England, rather than in Iberia. Owing to its multilingual ambience, Toledo was suitable as the locale where the translations were produced, but the clientele for these products apparently lived in Italy, France, and England.43 Less is known in this respect of the thirteenth-century projects. Ibn al-Haytham’s work was translated twice, also in Castile. However, both versions have come down to us in unique manuscripts. One of these versions was prepared at the initiative of Alfonso X, and according to its introduction was based on an earlier Castilian edition by one Abraham Judaeus.44 The other manuscript of Ibn al-Haytham’s text may have been based on a literal translation of an earlier Hebrew version.45 Hence, not only were these Latin translations often borrowed from earlier Hebrew texts, but their reception was not particularly broad, especially not on the Iberian Peninsula. It is particularly telling that in the sixteenth century when printed Latin translations of both al-Farghani’s and Ibn al-Haytham’s texts were published, the earlier medieval versions were apparently no longer available, and the printed editions were newly rendered from the Hebrew, of which there were copies.46

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Hebrew renderings of the Almagest and other astronomic works of the Ptolemaic tradition, on the other hand, enjoyed great popularity, particularly in Iberia. Most of these books were written in either Sefardi or Middle Eastern script. Some were copied during the sixteenth century in Italy or Turkey by Sefardi scribes, but much of the extant material was produced during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Iberia. We should not forget, however, that many of the Sefardi copies may not have survived either the persecutions of 1391 or the expulsions from Iberia in 1492 and 1496. Hence, the surviving corpus is apparently but a small portion of what might have existed originally.47 For example, out of thirty-nine premodern (pre-1500) Hebrew manuscripts of versions or paraphrases of the Almagest, eighteen are in Sefardi script (all of these seem to predate the expulsion),48 and similar statistics can be drawn for the other texts. Hence, even though several of these translations were made in Sicily and Naples, the manuscript evidence of these Hebrew renderings clearly indicates that it was Sefardi Jews in Iberia who found the most interest in these works. The manuscript evidence of this literature in Hebrew is thus one of the many aspects of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Sefardi intellectual life, where opportunities to study that material abounded. Elisha Cresques belonged to this culture, whereas his Christian fellow cartographers had no equivalent sources at their disposal. The reception of these Hebrew versions of Arabic geographic and astronomic texts leads us right to the Call of the City of Majorca, modern Palma, where Elisha resided and ran his workshop near what is now the Carrer de Ramón Llul. Among his neighbors, he counted the physician Lleó Judah Mosconi, a native of Ohrid in the Byzantine Empire who had settled in Majorca, where he kept a rich collection of manuscripts. When Mosconi’s wife, Muna, died in 1375, while he was absent from Majorca, Mosconi’s belongings and his library were put up for sale, but the final auction was only held after Mosconi himself had died in 1377. Elisha and his son Jafudá, seventeen at the time, were present at the auction. Elisha counted among the witnesses of the sale and bought six of the books. Jafudá acquired three other titles. At each auction an inventory was prepared, copies of which have come down to us and are now kept in the Archivo del Reino de Mallorca.49 The documents were written in Latin with the book titles transcribed into the vernacular; not all the titles can be unambiguously linked to known Hebrew titles, but most of them can be identified.50 Among the books purchased by Elisha and Jafudá was an astrological treatise attributed to Abraham ibn Ezra (d. 1169), Mishpete hamazalot (Judgment of the

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zodiac), which is a didactic introduction to astrology that relies heavily on Ptolemy’s work.51 Mosconi had owned a copy of Abraham bar Hiyya’s The Shape of the Earth and two copies of the Hebrew Almagest. Whether Geminos’s Introduction was among Mosconi’s books cannot be said, as it would, most likely, have been associated with one of the copies of the Almagest. Surviving manuscripts of Geminos’s text in Hebrew commonly present it as part of the Almagest and mention Ptolemy as author. The collection further contained both a Hebrew and an Arabic copy of Ibn al-Haytham’s text. Mentioned in the list are also several works by Ibn Rushd, but without clear indications of their titles. Thus, almost the entire corpus that seems to have shaped the geographical concept of the Paris ecumene chart was there. The only work missing, surprisingly, one might say, is al-Farghani’s treatise, to which the Hebrew versions refer as Qitsur almagesti (Abridged version of the Almagest). However, Mosconi’s inventory does contain a manuscript that the Christian notary apparently distorted into cotzar, and seems to be a qitsur, an abridged version of some work,52 and it is possible that cotzar refers to al-Farghani’s work. In fact, the notary distorted some of the titles to a degree that makes it impossible to recognize them. One can also see that Hebrew versions of the Almagest and texts by Ibn Rushd, Ibn al-Haytham, and al-Farghani were often lumped together with Abraham bar Hiyya’s The Shape of the Earth in a single manuscript. This seems to increase the chances that Mosconi had also owned a copy of al-Farghani’s text. There is good reason to assume that Elisha took a great interest in this library and may have been familiar with it not only at the time of the sale, but well before Mosconi’s death.53 Elisha’s world map was already completed by the time the auction took place, and the reason that he did not buy the Almagest or The Shape of the Earth may have to do with the possibility that he had copied them earlier as sources for his cartographic work. Borrowing books from a nearby collection, memorizing them, and copying them was a common practice among medieval Jews.54 Furthermore, the apparent absence of al-Farghani’s text does not exclude the possibility that Elisha knew of the work in some other way, as it was widely known among Sefardi Jews. In 1380 Elisha Cresques was commissioned by the Aragonese court to prepare a map as a royal gift to the French crown prince.55 The Catalan mappamundi, in French possession since 1380, was produced a few years earlier, but must have been created with similar intentions in mind as a tool for learning and erudition. Elisha attempted to introduce the concept of

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Figure 1.3. Northeastern Asia, Catalan mappamundi, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. Esp. 30, Majorca, ca. 1375, sheet 12, detail.

portolan chart making into the field of study maps of the entire ecumene. The classic medieval study map was the circular mappamundi. Usually hung on walls, these maps had didactic and sometimes even devotional functions. Indeed, scholars of medieval maps differentiate between the genre of circular world maps and marine charts in terms of their functions. They maintain that the difference in function determined whether a map would have followed a conceptual approach or would have communicated geographic information.56 In some sense the Catalan world map projects the didactic functions of the traditional mappamundi onto the concept of marine charts. This intention can be discerned by a brief discussion of the map’s somewhat complex

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orientation. At first sight, it seems to be split, much in the typical manner of marine charts, into a northern section oriented toward the South and a southern half oriented toward the North. A closer look, however, indicates that there must have been several other considerations. In fact, orientation was handled differently throughout the entire map depending on different points of view: images, toponyms, city shapes, captions, and regional titles. One of these considerations must have been to suggest a circular movement around a table on which the map would have been laid out for study. Even though the map follows a Ptolemaic model and is thus rectangular, at its left and right edges there are clearly efforts to break with the north–south orientation, as if to force the viewer into a circular movement. For example, near the upper and lower edges the lettering of the regional titles is usually clearly oriented to the North or the South. To the left, however, for England and Ireland these titles are oriented to the West. On the outer right panel, this phenomenon of titles oriented to the sides is even more obvious, since there the imagery is oriented toward the East and so are the inscriptions in the upper-right-hand corner. The same applies to the imagery at the eastern edge of the map (figure 1.3). This observation indicates that the Catalan world map puts the two approaches, the one associated with the traditional mappamundi and that of the marine chart, into one framework. Presenting the ecumene in the visual language of a marine chart while adopting knowledge based on the Ptolemaic concept, Elisha turned it into a vehicle for learning and erudition. What is innovative is the fact that it gives up the traditional study concept that had always been associated with the traditional circular shape as a symbol of perfection and wholeness and approaches the ecumene as something to be studied in scientific terms by means of the Ptolemaic concept.

Chapter 2 Interpretation, Intention, and Impact Andalusi Arab and Norman Sicilian Examples of Islamo-Christian Cartographic Translation Karen Pinto

Translation is a two-way street. Or so the maps that I harness for the purposes of this chapter intimate: one a medieval European T-O map labeled in Arabic and the other a medieval Islamic geographical atlas made in Norman Sicily. One was interpreted by a famous eleventh-century Andalusi Muslim geographical scholar of Arab descent and the other illustrated by a Siculo-Arab cartographic artist may have had an influence on the childhood psyche of the emperor, Frederick II, who went on to be called Stupor Mundi (Wonder of the world). One ended up influencing the composition of an Arabic geographical text and the other had an impact on a segment of the Kitāb al-masālik wa-al-mamālik (Book of routes and realms) KMMS Islamic mapping tradition.1 Each speaks to crucial sides of translation: interpretation, intention, and impact. These are the sides that I intend to focus on in this chapter. This analysis provides us with an opportunity to explore the question of Islamo-Christian cartographic connections. Did medieval European maps influence the Islamic ones or vice versa? Or were they mutually exclusive? It is one of the major unresolved debates in the history of cartog41

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raphy. Scholars fall on both sides of the divide.2 A definitive answer to the question has been hampered by the lack of extant examples demonstrating Islamo-Christian cartographic connections. A decade ago a medieval European T-O map labeled in Arabic came back into the limelight after a fortyyear hiatus and recently I identified a KMMS geographic atlas as having been produced in the late twelfth century Norman court of Sicily. Taken together these new identifications make it possible to update the discourse on the question of Islamo-Christian cartographic connections. After years of noticing, collecting, and researching cartographic connections between the Muslim and Christian worlds, I am convinced that ideas of medieval map construction did indeed diffuse across the Mediterranean and that these cartographic ideas diffused multidirectionally in a series of back-and-forth iterations that ultimately informed and enriched the cartographic traditions of both cultures. Maps under Discussion One of the maps examined in this chapter is an unusual Isidorean T-O map labeled in Arabic that points to Muslim interaction with the medieval European mapping tradition. The map in question is part of a ninth-century Visigothic Latin Isidorean Etymologiae manuscript housed at the Biblioteca Nacionale de España. It is located on folio 116v of Ms. Vitr. 014/003.3 (Throughout this chapter I will refer to it in abbreviated form as the “BNE Ar. T-O”; figures 2.1 and 2.2). The other is a classical Islamic al-Iṣṭakhrī geographical atlas series that I recently identified as a product of Arabs in Norman Sicily toward the end of the twelfth century as the colophon tells us (figures 2.3 and 2.4).4 Leiden University Libraries 589 AH/1193 CE Cod. Or. 3101 is a well-known manuscript of the KMMS (Islamic atlas) tradition.5 Through careful codicological and paleographic analysis, I have determined that this manuscript was produced not in the Islamic world but in an Arabo-Norman atelier.6 What concerns us here is the act of translation and these two manuscripts and their maps make it possible for us to take informed stabs at what has hitherto been no more than shots in the dark. How does an Iberian Muslim prince and scholar interpret the T-O maps around him? What sense does a Sicilian Christian ruler make of an elaborately illustrated Islamic map manuscript? What do the Arabic annotations tell us of the former and the illustrations, calligraphy, and stamps tell us of the

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latter? These are the kind of questions that a comparison of two culturally different mapping traditions enable us to explore. BNE Ar. T-O Manuscript Let us start with the ninth-century Visigothic Latin copy of Bishop Isidore’s Etymologiae manuscript (BNE’s Ms. Vitr. 014/003) enclosing one of the earliest extant T-O maps. How popular were these manuscripts with a simple T world in an O Encircling Ocean? None survive from before the ninth century. After the ninth century we see a few, but the extant examples suggest that the trickle only grew into a flood during the Crusades in the late tenth and eleventh centuries and especially after the Crusades became regularized in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. See the listing in David Woodward’s, “Mappamundi” in the History of Cartography series for T-O maps and their dates that prove that the trend is upward from the eleventh and twelfth centuries onward until the extant numbers peak in the thirteenth–fourteenth centuries, and die out after the development of the portolan chart.7 The BNE Ar. T-O manuscript with Arabic annotations was made in the ninth century. Or so all the experts tell us, and from the looks of the manuscript (ink, parchment, etc.) the assessment appears to be accurate. The production date of the manuscript is not however the primary issue here. Rather the date of the insertion of Arabic notes both in the text and on the map are.8 The consensus is that the Arabic notes were done in either the tenth or eleventh century because in the twelfth century the manuscript found its way back to Christian hands during the Reconquista and some additional notes were added. It remained in Christian hands afterward. The ink and writing of the Arabic notations suggests that they were made sometime in the eleventh century and the Maghreb type of writing used indicates that the notations were made by an Arabic writer from North Africa or Muslim Spain (al-Andalus). Given that the Isidorean manuscript is from Spain, the thinking is that this manuscript did not leave the Iberian Peninsula but that ownership changed from Christian to Muslim and back to Christian.9 There are, in fact, Arabic notations in two hands: the earliest notations found only on the final colophon folio are in a cruder hard-to-distinguish Arabic hand made with a reddish madder brown ink. One answer is to see the rougher Latin-Arabic hand as that of a Christian-Mozarab and because

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Figure 2.1. T-O map with Arabic notations from a copy of Isidore’s Etymologiae. Circa eighth–ninth century. Ink on parchment. Courtesy: Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid. MS. Vitr. 014/003, fol. 116v.

of this the understanding of the Arabic notations of this manuscript, ever since the days of Gonzalo Menendez Pidal in the mid-1950s followed a quarter of a century later by P. Sj. Koningsveld’s doctoral dissertation work, have been couched in Mozarabic terms.10 I suggest instead that these cruder Arabic notations may have been made by the Andalusi geographer from Almeria, al-ʿUdhrī (d. 478/1085).11 Although only fragments of his work survive, they are considered among the most significant for the geography of eleventh century Andalus (Islamic Spain). The most extensive illustrations from folio 4v to the final colophon of

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Figure 2.2. Translation of Arabic and Latin notations on BNE T-O map (figure 2.1). Prepared by author.

163v including the hand that labeled the map were probably made in the latter half of the eleventh century. They are done in a dark soot-black ink and the Arabic is refined and therefore easy to read. The extensive notations throughout the manuscript indicate that the Arab-speaking owner examined this manuscript carefully. Folios 70–150 are so heavily tabbed with the names of places in Arabic corresponding to Isidore’s Latin text

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that it is clear that the owner of this manuscript was extremely interested in it and set about creating a marginal index of it of the kind that researchers use today. In the same way that we tab pages to reference later when we are writing up our research it would seem that the extensive Arabic notations on this Isidorean manuscript had a similar intent: that of research and use in scholarship. Al-Bakrī’s Interpretation and Translation of Isidore It is for this reason that I theorize that the person who made these Arabic notations in Muslim Spain in the eleventh century must have been an Arab geographer. One geographer, in particular, fits the bill. Abū ʿUbayd ʿAbdallāh al-Bakrī (d. 487/1094) who came from a princely family in Muslim Spain during the eleventh century and penned a number of geographical works including a general KMM, Kitāb al-masālik wa-al-mamālik (Routes and realms) geography without maps and Muʿ jam mā staʿ jama min asmāʾ al-bilād wa-l-mawāḍiʿ (A dictionary of unintelligible names of countries and places).12 What points us in this direction is the excellent article by the scholar Jean-Charles Ducène comparing al-Bakrī’s KMM text with that of Isidore’s Etymologies. Ducène presents a number of examples of close parallels between the Arabic and Latin texts: including the discussion on the Mediterranean islands of Cyprus, Crete, Sicily, and the European mainland sites of Macedonia, Thrace, and Thessaly.13 Amazingly, even the order of al-Bakrī’s discussion of the Mediterranean islands follows the order of Isidore and one is left wondering how many other Muslim geographers were influenced by Isidore through al-Bakrī’s work. We know, for instance, that the later geographer Ibn Sa’īd borrowed al-Bakrī’s description of coppermining in Cyprus, which al-Bakrī in turn took from Isidore.14 Impact of the BNE Ar. T-O Map on Muslim Geography Through this example of an Isidorean map and manuscript annotated in Arabic we have a rare window into the impact of Latin geographical literature on the work of a major Andalusi Muslim intellectual. In the history of Arabic geographical literature al-Bakrī is no small figure. He is considered by some scholars to be one of the greatest medieval Islamic geographers. His work was widely copied and transmitted across the medieval Islamic world. Since no original autograph copy of al-Bakrī’s work is known to be extant, this manuscript presents us with the tantalizing possibility of the

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only extant example of al-Bakrī’s handwriting.15 Precise provenance of the Arabic notations aside, this T-O map labeled in Arabic is nothing short of stunning both for the specialist in Islamic cartography and medieval European cartography and for the field of history of cartography in general. KMM Geographical and KMMS Cartogeographical Tradition Al-Bakrī’s KMM comes out of a well-established caliphal tradition of geographies to aid the real and the armchair traveler. They started as administrative geographies to assist in control of the vast and still rapidly growing Islamic Empire that the Abbasid caliphs came face to face with after they took over control.16 Science-based geographers, like al-Khwārazmī, added a scientific dimension to the administrative geographical mission by including detailed lists of places with their latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates. This scientific tradition eventually broke off to create a separate voluminous tradition known as zij tables on which scientists separate from the public worked at length. The KMM routes and realms geographical tradition took off in the direction of general nonscientific public consumption aimed at armchair travelers. The text was expanded on by a series of scholars with more juicy geographical detail embellished with fabulous tales. The fabulous tales element broke off and formed a genre of literature of its own known as the ʿajāʾib (the fantastic) within which KMM-based geographies continued to play a key role.17 The KMM geographical tradition expanded to incorporate pictures of the world, including some of the earliest extant regional maps, courtesy of three scholars, in particular: al-Iṣṭakhrī (fl. early tenth century), Ibn Ḥawqal (fl. second half of tenth century), and al-Muqaddasī (d. ca. 1000). I signal the difference between KMM and KMMS through the addition of “S” for “Surat” or picture which is the way in which the maps are titled in this the earliest known atlas tradition.18 Beginning with a brief description of the world and theories about it— such as the inhabited versus the uninhabited parts, the reasons that people are darker in the south than in the north, and so on—these geographies methodically discuss details about the Muslim world, its cities, people, roads, topography, and so forth. Sometimes the descriptions are interspersed with tales of personal adventures, discussions with local inhabitants, debates with sailors as to the exact shape of the earth and the number of seas, and so on. They have a rigid format that seldom varies, with a territorial se-

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quence as follows: first the whole world; then the Arabian Peninsula, the Persian Gulf, the Maghreb (North Africa and Andalusia), Egypt, Syria, the Mediterranean, and upper and lower Iraq; and finally twelve maps devoted to the Iranian provinces, beginning with Khuzistan and ending in Khurasan, including maps of Sind and Transoxiana. The maps, which usually number twenty-one—one world map and twenty regional maps—follow the same format as the text. Norman KMMS Atlas The second example of Islamo-Christian cartographic connections comes from this KMMS tradition. It is a twelfth-century copy of al-Iṣṭakhrī’s KMMS with a very clear colophon date of 589 AH/ 1193 CE that, on the basis of illustration details, can be identified as a production of Norman Sicily during the twilight of Norman flirtation with Arab culture.19 It represents a very different kind of translation: one with the deliberate intention of emphasizing the importance of Sicily both within the Mediterranean region and within the world at large (see figures 2.3 and 2.4). Were the authors of this stylized al-Iṣṭakhrī KMMS rendition Muslim artists interested in communicating the classical Islamic Atlas tradition to the Norman ruling class? Or was it the other way around? Was it the Norman ruling class that was trying to communicate a certain vision of the world and the Mediterranean to an audience in the Muslim world? This is one of the many tantalizing questions that surround the discovery of this manuscript’s Norman provenance. The story behind the Arabo-Norman KMMS atlas is as intriguing as that of the BNE Ar. T-O. The extra large size of the manuscript (30 × 43 cm)—the largest extant al-Iṣṭakhrī KMMS manuscript—along with its ornate calligraphy in gold suggests that it was intended for presentation to a high-level dignitary, most likely a ruler or a prince. Reader signatures on the colophon page, including the faint outlines of an ‘alāma (formal signature) of the type used by Norman dignitaries, indicates that it was perused by court dignitaries and possibly by members of the Norman ruling family.20 But which Norman king/ruling family? Here we run into a problem. The most likely candidate would have been William II (r. 1166–89). Like his father Roger I (r. 1130–54), William II was famous for his active patronage of Muslim culture: its arts, poetry, music, language, and women.21 The twelfth-century Andalusi traveler Ibn Jubayr, shipwrecked at the Straits of

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Messina, praised King William for his “confidence in Muslims, relying on them for his affairs, and the most important matters” and for his “attention to his Muslim physicians and astrologers.” Through Ibn Jubayr, we learned that William read and wrote Arabic. But we also heard through Ibn Jubayr that Muslims at William’s court were forced to hide their religion and conversion to Islam.22 It was a schizophrenic time for support of Islam in Norman Sicily: on the one hand it was super-positive and interactive as it had been during his father, Roger II’s time, including the building of the magnificent Monreale, famous for its Arabo-Norman artisanship, and, on the other hand, the persecution signaled the beginning of the end for Muslims in Sicily.23 It was an end that would be pursued vigorously by William II’s successor, Tancred of Lecce (r. 1189–94). By the date of Leiden’s Ms. 3101 colophon the manuscript falls into the last year of the brief reign of Tancred of Lecce. Tancred distinguished himself from William II as an ardent Crusader and Islamophobe. He is known for actively persecuting Muslims and inciting Christians to attack them and not surprisingly there were a number of serious Muslim uprisings during his reign.24 Given what we know of Tancred through the annals and history books, it seems unlikely that Leiden Libraries’ famous al-Iṣṭakhrī manuscript would have been made for Tancred. Tancred’s eldest son, Roger III, is a more viable option. During the troubled interregnum period in Sicily between Norman and Swabian rule (1190s), Tancred was keen to shore up succession to the throne so he nominated his eldest son, Roger III, as heir. Tancred feared, and rightly so, that Henry VI, the Hohenstaufen king from Germany, would swoop in to claim the Sicilian throne as his. Lacking progeny, William II married off his sister Constance to Henry and through her the Hohenstaufen king laid claim to the Sicilian throne within ten months of Tancred’s death in February 1194. The day following Henry’s coronation on December 25, 1194, as king of Sicily, his wife, Constance—no less than the daughter of the most famous convivencia-loving Norman king, Roger II (r. 1130–54)—gave birth to Frederick II in the public square of the small town of Jesi and in doing so secured the Swabian future of the Hohenstaufen-Norman bloodline.25 With the Hohenstaufens looming over his shoulder, while battling the Apulian rebels, Tancred nominated his eldest son, Roger III, as heir. And, in an effort to shore up his son’s succession, went so far as to name Roger co-king. Roger was officially crowned in a formal coronation ceremony in Palermo in the summer of 1192 following his betrothal to Irene, the daughter of the Byzantine emperor Isaac.26 Born to Tancred’s wife, Sibylla

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of Acerra (1153–1205), in 1175, Roger would have been around eighteen at the time of his appointment. An 1192 crowning along with a royal marriage may well have been the impetus for the preparation of an elaborately illuminated al-Iṣṭakhrī KMMS manuscript commissioned by local Sicilian Muslim leaders. Thinking that Roger would be the future king, they may have wished to use an elaborate KMMS manuscript as an offering of peace and mutual understanding to the next king so that he would go easy on the local Muslim community and reverse the brutal Islamophobic practices of his father and predecessors.27 The 1193 date given in the manuscript’s colophon would fit well with the dates of Roger III. Roger III, however, died prematurely young by late 1193, on Christmas eve to be precise, so he would not have gazed upon the Leiden KMMS manuscript’s curious maps for long. But it does speak to a number of elements including the eagerness of Muslims to get back into the good books of the Norman rulers along with the implication that in spite of Tancred’s efforts to stamp out Muslims and Muslim culture from Sicily that the community was still well-off enough to produce an exquisite manuscript of such richness and high illustration and calligraphic caliber as Leiden’s Ms. 3101. By default of the language of the manuscript, it implies that Arabic was still in use in Sicily, even if it was no longer of the highest caliber. The manuscript is a shortened and abbreviated version of al-Iṣṭakhrī’s KMMS with the occasional Arabic error. It also indicates that even in the twilight days of Arabo-Norman convivencia young princes in Sicily were well-versed enough in Arabic to receive gifts of illustrated Islamic manuscripts.28 Alas! We know little of Roger III who was no more than a minor bit player in the complicated Norman kingly drama of the 1190s. Hence neither the chronicles nor secondary sources devote more than a line or two to him. His sudden “unnatural” death for which we lack even mention of a cause is said to have felled his already ailing father, Tancred, from grief two months later in February 1194. Tancred’s death brought on the brief and tragic reign of the last Norman king, William III (r. 1194), Roger’s younger brother—if he can even be called Norman.29 William was only nine years old at the time so his mother, Sibylla of Acerra, took over briefly as regent to her underaged son until the much awaited invasion of southern Italy and Sicily by the Hohenstaufen king Henry VI finally materialized in the summer of 1194. It is certainly possible that William III browsed Leiden Libraries’ alIṣṭakhrī manuscript, which would have remained in the library of the Nor-

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man kings until it made its way to Anatolia and Ottoman hands.30 Intriguing is the possibility that one of the most famous Holy Roman Emperors, Frederick II (r. 1220–50 but 1198–1250 as king of Sicily from the age of three with a regent), son of the Hohenstaufen Henry VI and the Norman Constance, may have perused this manuscript. A couple of curious signatures on the colophon are suggestive of the hand of a young Latin speaker trying to write his name in Arabic. We know from his biographers that Frederick was familiar at least with colloquial Arabic.31 Frederick was a fascinating character. Peripatetic by nature, he was known as the emperor without a permanent residence.32 He had it would seem a permanent wanderlust born out of his split heritage between Germany and Sicily. One cannot help but wonder to what extent manuscripts such as Leiden’s KMMS encouraged Frederick to travel and see the world. That Frederick had a fascination with Arabic culture is no secret. Karla Mallette pegs to Frederick the transition period between the waning of Arabic and the rise of the Romance vernacular. But she also points out that while Frederick was probably not as fluent in Arabic as his grandfather Roger II and uncle William II, he nonetheless continued to harbor a deep fascination with Arab culture that was manifested in his interest in Islamic science and philosophy as demonstrated by the letters he wrote to Arab intellectuals of the time.33 Even as he continued the tradition of Tancred to eliminate the Muslims from Sicily and banished Sicilian Muslims to the colony of Lucera in 1222/23, Frederick also established a palace for himself there that he regularly frequented to partake of the pleasures of Muslim culture.34 It is in this context that we should view this rare Norman rendition of al-Iṣṭakhrī’s KMMS as possibly one of the earliest Islamic cartogeographic influences on Frederick’s vision of the world. To understand what this could have been we need to turn to a discussion of the maps contained within the Leiden KMMS manuscript. Distinctive Features of Maps from Leiden al-Istakhrī KMMS The Leiden al-Iṣṭakhrī manuscript affords us an opportunity to examine the ways in which twelfth-century Arabo-Norman illustrators molded the al-Iṣṭakhrī maps to fit with their perspective of the world through a Sicilian lens. One of the most noticeable elements is the way in which the island of Sicily is given a prominent berth in the maps of the world, the Mediterranean, and the Maghreb (North Africa and Andalus).35 The al-Iṣṭakhrī KMMS world maps break down broadly into two stem-

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Figure 2.3. Classic KMMS world map, “Sūrat al-Ard” [Picture of the world], from an abbreviated copy of al-Ist akhrī’s Kitāb al-masālik wa-al-mamālik [Book of routes and realms]. 589/1193. Siculo-Arab. Gouache and ink on paper. Diameter 37.5 cm. Courtesy: Leiden University Libraries. Cod. Or. 3101, fols. 4–5.

mata: those that contain three islands apiece in the two major seas of the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean and those that do not. This is one of the first cuts in the stemma of al-Iṣṭakhrī world maps, and the Leiden al-Iṣṭakhrī manuscript falls at the head of this branch. The islands of Sicily, Crete, and Cyprus stand out in a bold red against a slate gray sea.36 The world map belongs to a different, possibly earlier, manuscript on which the rest of the Norman manuscript was built. It is made with a different hand, different pigments, different patterns, and distinctly different ornamental calligraphy.37 In this version of the world map, three red islands stand out prominently in each sea: Sicily, Crete, and Cyprus, in the Mediterranean and Bahrain, Qeshm, and Sri Lanka in the Persian Gulf/Indian Ocean. It shows the old world of Africa, Asia, and Europe with south on top spreadeagled on the oceans in the shape of a bird.38 The islands are like large ruby studs under the overstretched/arched wings of Africa pinpoint-

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ing immediately to the most important stepping-stone islands of the two major seas that Muslim ships plied. Within the red studs of the Mediterranean, as the one closest to Europe and the entrance into the Encircling Ocean (combination of Atlantic and Pacific), Sicily stands out as one of the crucial red ones. A ruler in Sicily would have been pleased to see the prominent berth accorded to Sicily in the Islamic world map as one of the three key commanding islands of the Mediterranean, controlling the sea for all the world to see. Corollary to Sarandīb (Sri Lanka) in the Indian Ocean, Sicily is presented in the KMMS map as the last major island before entering the terrifying but cosmographically connected Encircling Ocean. Sicily, like Sri Lanka, offered the final island ticket before stepping out into the wild blue yonder of the sea that ended—if you were blessed like Alexander and the hoopoe—in the upper reaches of heaven, close to God.39 To understand the impact of the Siculo-Arab artists one must look to the other maps of the Leiden KMMS manuscript, in particular the maps of the Mediterranean and the Maghreb (i.e., North Africa and al-Andalus) in which the island of Sicily features prominently.40 Ṣūrat Baḥr al-Rūm (figure 2.4), the representation of the Mediterranean in the KMMS mapping tradition is especially striking with the Mediterranean map of Leiden’s Or. 3101 standing out as one of the most distinctive examples. The three orange islands of Sicily, Crete, and Cyprus that form the central backbone of the Mediterranean jump out at first glance. Beyond these is a strange orchid triangle with inverted purple crescents that caps this tripartite wall of islands while at the same time commanding the commingling of the waters of the Mediterranean with that of the Atlantic Ocean, which is part of the world Encircling Ocean (Baḥr al-Muḥīṭ). This is the mythical island of Jabal al-Qilāl (Mountain of Qilāl) that no one has yet definitively identified. From this our eye moves to the three other red circles on the left-hand side of the sea: the two islands of Damietta (Dumyāṭ) and Tinnīs sitting like two round red eyes in the mouth of the Nile Delta— referred to on this map as Buḥaira Tinnīs. In a straight line above on the shores of the Atlantic lies the red semicircle for al-Sūs al-Aqsā.41 Surrounding these islands the classic shape of the medieval Islamic vision of the Mediterranean emerges as a bulbous/vaselike form, wrapping itself around the islands in such a way that the two halves look like mirror images of each other capped off with the broad band of the Atlantic Ocean. The only imbalance in this perfectly harmonic image of the Mediterranean are the disruptions on its lower left of the circular mouth of the Nile versus

Figure 2.4. Map of the Mediterranean with Jabal al-Qilāl (red square) from an abbreviated copy of al-Ist akhrī’s Kitāb al-masālik wa-al-mamālik [Book of routes and realms] with a symbol for the mythical pillars of Hercules that guard the mouth of the Mediterranean in all KMMS maps. This version is decorated with dark-red inverted crescents. 589/1193. Siculo-Arab. Gouache and ink on paper. 34 × 26 cm. Courtesy: Leiden University Libraries. Cod. Or. 3101, fol. 33.

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the rectangular mouth of the Bosporus, labeled Khalīj Qusṭanṭiniya. Below, at the center point of the image, in line with the three red islands, are three long rectangular riverine offshoots of the Mediterranean, representing the well-known rivers of the Anatolian plain: Jayḥan, Sayḥan, and Baradān. The latter river, known in Latin circles as the Cydnus, was coincidentally where Frederick’s grandfather and namesake, Frederick Barbossa died at the age of sixty-seven or sixty-eight while returning from the Third Crusade. These three rivers served with the three islands to reinforce the separation from the northern and southern (including southeastern) halves of the Mediterranean—coincidentally a separation between the Christian and Muslim halves of the sea. This does not include the aberration of Andalus where site markers give the Arab names of key towns, suggestive of Muslim colonization beyond the Islamo-Christian divide. Similar site markers are packed into the Levantine and Maghrebi littorals with a few scattered in Anatolia, suggestive of Muslim encroachments on that flank. The only indication of formal boundedness is in the semirectangular black outlined window on the European flank abutting the Bosporus on one end and the Mediterranean on the other, that shows Ifranj (land of the Franks) in a “Misty Rose” (Lavendar Blush/Seashell) semicircle with Bilād ‘Ajlaskas (reference to the Galicians) above them and Bilād Baskūnis (reference to the Basques) below. The four corners of the page are labeled with directions: aljunūb (south) along the upper left corner; al-mashriq (east) along lower left; al-shumāl (north) leaning into the lower right, and al-gharb (west) written in the direction of the upper right. Unusually the map is drawn looking out toward the west from the caliphal heartlands—this is a break from the customary southerly direction of the majority of medieval Islamic maps.42 Norman Ruler’s Interpretive Intention Presuming that this manuscript was made for the Sicilian rulers, what would their kings and proto-kings—given that Roger III did not live long enough to succeed to the throne—have seen in this KMMS manuscript? Would they have seen it as a quizzical set of curious geometrically inclined images of the world, as we do? Or would they actually have used this manuscript to further their knowledge of the world? To understand the answer to this question one has to immerse oneself in the milieu of the time through its material culture. The matter of Norman fascination with Arab culture is no secret. One trip to Palermo is sufficient to make this apparent. Lintels with ornamental Arabic inscriptions are

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tucked away atop columns in the most unlikely of Norman churches. Many of these Norman churches are topped with strange bulbous red domes vestiges of their Muslim Kalbid past. The Normans kept these and built upon them but they did so in very elegant ways, merging Islamo-Christian artistic styles in the most exquisite harmony, such as: the delicate gold ṭirāz arabic calligraphic edging on Roger II’s coronation cape with an unmistakable symbolic message of a lion pouncing onto the back of a camel and killing it; or the magnificent wooden ceiling of the Capella Palatina with its honeycombed muqarnas dome inlaid with the most delicate and seemingly impossible vignette-like images of Arabs at the Norman court—flute players, dancers, wine servers—surrounded by sprays of exquisitely delicate Siculo-Arabic calligraphy. These are the spaces that the Norman elite inhabited, and judging by how widespread it was one would imagine that it spilled over to the local populace. Reinforced by chronicles and chancery documents, the extant remains testify to a great Norman fascination and active flirtation with Arab culture. Arabo-Norman convivencia rivaled that of Andalus and boasted the finest Arab artisans and painters of the age.43 But as the Normans petered out following the brilliant greatness of Roger II so did Norman interaction with Islamic culture. The quality of Arabic on both sides, Muslim and Christian, declined until the last of the Muslims were deported to Lucera in 1222/23. It is in this space that Leiden’s KMMS was born. Islamic culture and Arabic not yet eviscerated still retained echoes of the glorious Sicilian past. The KMMS map manuscript made in this climate was a perfect gift for a young king-prince like Roger III, whose Arabic would have been basic or nonexistent. Pictures with only a little text and the help of a tutor—fluent in both languages—would have sufficed for a Sicilian noble illiterate in Arabic. Commissioned soon after Roger’s accession to the crown, the number of signatures on Leiden’s KMMS colophon page is a sign that it was read at some length by a number of Sicilian dignitaries. What kind of reception would this manuscript have received in late twelfth-century Sicily? One would expect that by dint of their island nature the Sicilians would have been knowledgeable sailors. They sat astride the most dangerous straits of the Mediterranean, the Straits of Messina, site of the largest number of shipwrecks in the Mediterranean. Given their very regular need to travel to the mainland and Apulia, where the Normans had a foothold, as well as the frequency of crusades that sailed to the Holy Land from Messina, they would have developed a good understanding of the shape of the coast around the Calabrian Peninsula. Elders with experience

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would probably have scoffed at these maps. For others, especially those of younger age, like William III and Frederick II, both around the age of four when they were crowned kings, KMMS manuscripts such as Leiden’s Ms. 3101 could have been used as a teaching tool for princely education to explain the layout of the world. This is where Frederick’s title as Stupor Mundi and the KMMS manuscript come into play. Known as such because of his brilliant mind and insatiable Renaissance-like intellectual curiosity, it is tempting to think that Frederick may have been weaned on world geography through this Arabic KMMS manuscript. It may even have been one of his favorites as the two curious signatures below the colophon that appear to be a sort of double Latin/Arabic visual teaser spelling out the first part of Frederick’s name suggests.44 Although similar, one signature is more mature than the other, suggesting that the person who employed this strange youthful signature kept coming back to this KMMS manuscript. Given his peripatetic reputation, Frederick II would have been the kind of intellectual who would have been able to squeeze a lot out of the KMMS maps. If he understood how to look beyond the lack of mimesis he could start to appreciate the figurative layout of the world and its symbolic meanings. Given that Frederick was an eager and constant traveler it is possible that the Leiden KMMS manuscript may have been one of the earliest inspirations for his endless journeys. Leiden’s KMMS could have left a medieval king with the greatest desire of all: a desire to explore the world! Translation as a Process of Interpretation, Intention, and Impact This chapter has sought to explore Islamo-Christian connections by looking at the interaction of Muslim scholars with medieval Christian cartography and, the reverse, medieval Islamic cartographic manuscripts produced in a medieval Christian context. Space limitations preclude a discussion of other examples, such as, the role that al-Idrisi’s mapping enterprise and that of the Book of Curiosities played on the Norman and medieval European stage along with further examination of the impact of Isidore’s work on those Muslim geographers who relied on information from al-Bakrī’s geography. This study of the interpretation, intention, and impact of the BNE Ar. T-O and the Leiden KMMS implies an earlier translative intersection between the medieval European and Islamic mapping traditions than was hitherto known.45

Chapter 3 Mountains of the Moon, Lakes in the Sun, and Sinus Gangeticus Rila Mukherjee

This chapter examines successive refinements in the Ptolemaic arrangement of the Bengal delta’s rivers and in the depiction of the Sinus Gangeticus that were carried out in Europe during the sixteenth–seventeenth centuries. Ptolemy’s Geographia, from which this fluvial model derives, had a double impact—once in the second century CE when it was written in Alexandria, and again in the fourteenth century onward when it was rediscovered in Europe. We should also note there are no maps by Ptolemy, the map of the Bengal delta numbered figure 3.1 in this chapter is a late medieval reconstruction based on Ptolemy’s calculations. There was a double innovation in the Ptolemaic geographical enterprise: once, when Ptolemy introduced his radically new geographical scheme into the classical world and once again during the Renaissance, when mapmakers refined the neo-Ptolemaic maps and thereby created novel ways of seeing the world in contrast to the medieval, biblical worldview that prevailed at that time. The continuing shifts—often advances, but also regressions—in the portrayal of rivers using Arabic and Catalan information to update representations of the globe from Cadiz to the Indus; the hydrological models used; the biblical notion of a shadowy Central Asia as fluvial fountainhead; the efforts of Europe-based cartographers to portray an important segment of the Indian Ocean; and the recurring backward 58

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steps in their maps even as their overall quality improved, reveal a scientific undertaking in the codification of knowledge that resulted from transfers between Asia and Europe spanning several centuries.1 The print revolution aided dissemination, and maps and atlases could henceforth, theoretically at least, reach thousands. Renaissance Mapmaking Centers This essay underlines the fact that transfers did not always take place in a systematic manner, and innovations did not occur only in those centers participating in the Indian Ocean trade. There were four concurrent but unrelated centers for cartography in early modern Europe: first, Germanic centers, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Mainz, Strasburg, Basel, and Ulm, replicating the Ptolemaic model and culminating in Münster’s Cosmographia of 1544. Second, Venice was an important maritime center where Giacomo Gastaldi’s 1548 edition of Geographia and Girolamo Ruscelli’s Geografia di Claudio Tolomeo of 1561 were supplemented by Giovanni Antonio Magini’s and Girolamo Porro’s revisions between 1596 and 1599. This center produced maps and atlases into the late eighteenth century, as can be seen from the output of Antonio Zatta’s press. Third, Antwerp and Amsterdam had an independent map making tradition, where Gerard Mercator’s Map of the World of 1569 improved on Münster’s general map of 1559 in the Cosmographia by using the new scientific method of projection. It showed the rapid accumulation of geographical information and its reorganization on a scientific plan—Mercator’s projection—which depicted the world in one view and demonstrated the most effective way for a vessel to sail in a straight line over a curved surface. Mercator’s rival and friend Ortelius produced a map in 1570, the first modern atlas and universal encyclopedia—Theatrum Orbis Terrarum—a “world machine” or stage on which all lands might live in peace.2 A fourth center in fifteenth-century Sagres interrogated Ptolemaic formulations, revising portolans by integrating Arabic, Catalan, and Asian geographical/nautical knowledge into a new corpus. Portuguese sailors, even if they sailed with Ptolemy’s Geographia, often discarded it once on the open seas because the Geographia was already outdated.3 This essay traces the reception of Ptolemy’s Sinus Gangeticus in the four centers, all of which adopted the model and consequently revised their maps, but with varied representations and very different outcomes.

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Twin Worlds: Ethiopia–India and Nile–Ganges To understand the novelty of Claudius Ptolemy’s portrayal of the Sinus Gangeticus in the Bengal delta, we must reference earlier geographical notions. The ancients had always used rivers to determine a region, and Ptolemy was no exception. The Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers encircle eastern South Asia, the Ganges delta adjoining the Brahmaputra–Meghna delta in what is now Bangladesh. This second Bengal delta was unknown to classical Europe and only the Ganges was regarded as the easternmost limit of Asia. Capella and Orosius saw the Ganges flowing into the Eastern Sea, the outermost limit of the known world. Artemidorus calculated the distance, down to the last mile, from Gades to the Ganges and the Peutinger Table separated the world into twelve divisions stretching from Britain to the mouths of the Ganges.4 Europe knew of the Nile, the Euphrates, the Tigris, and the Indus. Greek, Arabic, and Catalan notices included the Oxus. The Nile was the best known, being for Egyptians the original circumnavigating river–sea. This view, along with Greek conceptions of the ecumene and rivers as constituent parts of the okeanos—the all-encircling ocean–sea— but also as discrete entities, influenced European mapping.5 However, the Nile was not always regarded as an African river and some even equated it to the Indus, which flows through western South Asia. Alexander, Virgil, and Procopius, seeing Ethiopia and India as one, believed the Nile originated in India. Others believed the Indus and the Nile were linked through an underground passage running below what came to be known as the Arabian Sea. Homer and Aeschylus believed one crossed Ethiopia to go from Europe to Asia. Herodotus, Diodorus, and Pliny saw the interplay of Africans and Asians in West Asia, referencing an “Ethiopianized” Egypt, often arguing the Ethiopian origins of Egypt itself: “colonists from Ethiopia,” the possibility of “black” Canaanites, commerce and diplomacy, marriages and strategic alliances cementing political and economic power in the region as in Josephus Flavius’s characterization of Moses’s marriage to the Ethiopian princess Tharbis. Herodotus referenced “two sorts of Ethiopians” in his illustration of the Persian army’s composition: “The eastern Ethiopians . . . served with the Indians. These were just like the southern Ethiopians, except for their language and their hair: [it] is straight, while that of the Ethiopians in Libya is the crispest and curliest in the world. The equipment of the Ethiopians from Asia was in most respects like the Indian.” Herodotus therefore situated a distinct group of Africans in Asia—“Ethiopians.”6

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Procopius described the Nile as flowing from India into Egypt, dissecting the land into two equal parts to the sea, presaging the eighth-century Albi mappamundi, which showed the world as a horseshoe, with Africa placed along the right spur. Starting from the Red Sea, the Ganges ran through Africa, while the Nile joined the Red Sea and the Mediterranean.7 This belief lasted, influencing the fictitious mid-fourteenth century Travels of Sir John Mandeville. In 1404 an epistolary exchange from Friuli in Italy noted: “There are here three black Ethiopians from India, good Christians, who brought along a young interpreter, they want to visit holy churches and always ask about sacred relics.”8 Both the Nile–Gihon and the Ganges continued to be seen as Indian rivers in early modern Europe. In Martin Behaim’s 1492 globe India/Ethiopia and the Ganges/Nile were one, carrying the legend: “In the Book of Genesis it is stated that this country through which flows the Ganges is called Havilla. The best gold in the world is said to grow there. . . . This country of Gulat and Ophir, through which flows the River Ganges or the water of Gion, belonged together.”9 These views muddled perceptions of India, which were further complicated when perceiving “India” from the East because the Ganges then also became a Chinese river. Tang annals had used the name “Ganges” for the Mekong, placing a part of Laos—Zhan Bo in the central Mekong basin—as south of “Jiang Jiahe” or the Ganges. Indic influences in Champa are significant; the shapes of the great southward bends in the middle Mekong and the lower Ganges are similar.10 This Indic–Buddhist view percolated into Europe and actually reinforced biblical geographical notions, particularly the notion of the rivers of paradise. Marignolli actually saw three blocs of Manzi, Mynibar, and Maabar: “India was peopled and divided into three kingdoms. The first . . . is called Manzi . . . formerly called Cyn and it has to this day the noble port and city called Cynkalan, i.e. ‘Great India’ . . . the second India . . . is called Mynibar. . . . The third province of India is called Maabar,” where, visiting the supposed tomb of St. Thomas in Mylapur around 1352, he discerned a Greater India, spanning the east and west coasts of Africa and India.11 Marco Polo, viewing Asia from the West, divided India into the Greater, Lesser, and the Middle, the Greater being the whole of India and the peninsula—the country extending from the Ganges to the Indus inclusive of Ptolemy’s India intra Gangem—and the Lesser approximating Ptolemy’s India extra Gangem, the space included between the eastern coast of the peninsula of India, and that of Cochinchina/Champa. Abyssinia, the coast

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of Arabia and the Persian Gulf lay in Middle or Second India, but for Conti this was “Greater India” or “India Major,” extending from Persia to the Indus and including the Swahili coast of Africa as the Arabian Sea connected Africa to Asia through religious, cultural, and commercial networks.12 Accordingly, differentiation in Vasco da Gama and Duarte Barbosa was in terms of “black” Africans and “white” South Asian “Moors,” and the first Portuguese in Melaka around 1511 were regarded by the natives as “white Bengalis.”13 Universal River of Paradise If the Nile was the originary river, the Ganges was equally legendary for Ctesias, Alexander, Megasthenes Arrian, Curtius, Strabo, Plutarch, Pliny the Elder, Virgil, and Apollonius.14 Dionysius Periegetes described the wanderings of Bacchus, “who set up pillars by the Ganges and the eastern Ocean.” Ovid, after his banishment to the Black Sea, recalled Bacchus journeying to Persia and the “broad-flowing Ganges.” 15 For Ptolemy it was the Ganges and not the Indus that defined South Asia, but his Sinus Gangeticus in India Extra Gangem dispensed with biblical and mythic associations. Following the Indic–Buddhist model, his Gangetic scheme saw a universal Asian system—a transpeninsular waterway much like a drainage system with a trunk stream with lateral rivers branching off in many directions.16 But the Ganges was also equated with the Phison, one of the four rivers of Eden in the Book of Genesis, surfacing in Josephus in the first century CE: “Now the river goeth out from Eden to water Paradise. And from there it was parted and became four heads. The name of the first is Phison (Pishon); that is it which compasseth the whole land of Euilat (India), where there is gold” and, in the fifth century in St. Jerome, bringing from its source in Paradise gems coveted by the great ladies of Europe: “rubies and emeralds, glowing pearls and gems of the first water . . . There are also mountains of gold which however men cannot approach by reason of the griffins, dragons, and huge monsters which haunt them.”17 Its source was in the Caucasian Mons, deriving from the popular belief that Paradise lay high up, corresponding to the image of the Ganges flowing down from a great height. As early as the third century BCE, Megasthenês recorded the river as originating in the mountains of Asia.18 In the 1592 English Faustbuch Dr. Faustus looked down on Scythia and India from a peak in the Caucasus Mountains, seeing the four rivers of Paradise: Ganges, Nile, Euphrates, and Tigris.19

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But Paradise moved. In the Ravenna mappamundi (ca. 650 CE), Paradise was an island off India, facing the Ganges. In the Hereford map (ca. 1280 CE) Paradise was depicted as a circular island at the mouth of the Ganges, probably Marignolli’s “Seyllan”; the Garden of Eden was placed there also in the Borgia World Map made between 1410 and 1458.20 While the Ganges was equated with riches, for Dante the Ganges was also an allegory of Time: “Night wheels on, while the sands of the Ganges tip the scales of time” (Purgatorio 2.4–6); “And noontide scorches down on Ganges’ flood, so rode the sun . . .” (Purgatorio 27.4–5). These legends persisted, Marvell’s coy mistress still finding precious stones on its shores as late as the seventeenth century: “Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side shouldst rubies find” (Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”). However, because the Ptolemaic enterprise had completely ignored this biblical geography, the reception of his ideas in fourteenth-century Europe created geographic confusion and a philosophical tension between the two schemes that remained only partially resolved even in the seventeenth century. After Ptolemy The fourteenth-century rediscovery of Ptolemy structured European cartography for over a century. No manuscript prior to the twelfth century CE is available, and that from Rome’s Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Gr. 191 is the first. The Geographia arrived in Europe in 1397, but was really “discovered” in fifteenth-century Europe when it was translated into Latin in 1406. Based on a composite text by Jacopo d’Angelo, it was variously printed from 1475 on, with cumulative revisions based on Byzantine Greek manuscripts.21 As neo-Ptolemaic maps proliferated during the Renaissance, mapmakers reconciled Ptolemaic notions with the latest geographical information and projections. Now Ptolemy’s insufficient knowledge of Asian river systems created a cartographic confusion within Renaissance geography.22 A polymath, Ptolemy had accessed reports of Alexander’s Indian expedition and the writings of the early Greeks of Asia Minor, Eratosthenes, Strabo, and Marinus of Tyre, Tyre being prominent in the Rome–India trade. It remains uncertain how far he accessed the contemporary Periplus Maris Erythraei and Parthian Stations of Isidore of Charax on Central Asian land routes, but he certainly blended Greek theory with Roman practice. His partition of Asia beyond the Roman frontier reflected the

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division of the Persian Empire into satrapies existing in Alexander’s time, part of the traditional apparatus of Greek geography.23 Topics as diverse as astronomy, mathematics, physics, optics, harmonics, chronology, and geography structured his views.24 Although blamed for linking Africa to China by way of an enclosed Indian Ocean, Ptolemy had also separated Ethiopia from India and devoted considerable space to the Nile as an unrelated river—innovative at that time because it went against prevalent geographic assumptions. He ultimately located the Nile’s source in the four fountains emanating from Herodotus’s “Mountains of the Moon” in Africa. Ptolemy referenced Diogenes’s twenty-five days’ travel in about 50 CE from Rhapta before encountering two great lakes and a mountain range from where the Nile drew its source. The legend persisted until d’Anville and de l’Isle erased the Mountains of the Moon and the three Lakes of the Nile from their maps. But the midnineteenth century explorations of Burton, Speke, and Stanley saw the lakes reappearing, and Ptolemy’s not-so-apocryphal geography of the Nile was proved correct.25 Discarding the originary river–sea hypothesis that privileged the Nile, Ptolemy conceived of a world of continents enclosing open and closed seas, a revolutionary departure for his times that, unfortunately, influenced and misled mapmakers and sailors into the fifteenth century.26 As Bengal became progressively significant in the Bay of Bengal exchanges for the Portuguese, Renaissance mapmakers applied his notion of a transpeninsular waterway to the Bengal delta, seeing a flexible basin accommodating multiple rivers; these, as in the Leardo and Waldseemuller maps of 1442 and 1511, were major locators of cities and polities and, to a lesser degree, of mountains and coastlines. As the Ganges flowed to the sea from Bengal, the source and course of the universal Ganges needed to be determined in Renaissance Europe.27 Although Ptolemy had separated the rivers of the Bengal delta and those of China by designating a Sinus Magnus to the east in addition to the Sinus Gangeticus, for Marignolli, Paradise was still the source, the river uniting India and China: “The . . . Phison . . . goes through India . . . and is said to go down to into Cathay, where, by a change of name, it is called Caromoran.”28 Paradise became increasingly peripheralized, but the easterly projection of the Ganges retained the notion of one India–China; the Mekong and then the Pearl River symbolized the Ganges. The river rose in the Imaus Mons in Fra Mauro’s world map of 1459, while the Amarus/Indus—in reality the Ganges—flowed from the “Mons caucasus” into the “ocean”: the

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Bay of Bengal. Confused with the Yangtze, the Ganges in turn flowed into the sea through two arms: the Sinus Gangeticus with the Ganges entering north and the “Golfo de gange over de zouza,” opposite Taiwan.29 Tome Pires wrote: “The Ganges has two mouths, one in Cambodia and the other in Bengala.”30 Mercator called the “Guenga” of Bengal the false Ganges: “This true Ganges, which is also the Ganges of the ancients, must be sought elsewhere than in the Bay of Bengal. . . . We maintain therefore that the very great river Cantan is the celebrated Ganges of the ancients . . . there is no doubt that the Ganges lies more to the eastward than Taprobana.”31 The following year, Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum saw the Ganges flowing southward through Myanmar, becoming “Cantan fl.” and discharging into the China Sea. One branch, bisecting on the Yunnan–Myanmar border at Cangigu, came into Bengal through “Pendua,” the capital Pandua.32 Mercator’s grandson Gerhard Mercator published a map of Asia in 1595, in which the Ganges flowed through India’s northeast, turned southeast and descended into the sea on the same stretch of the Chinese coast as Fra Mauro’s “Cantan fl. olim Ganges.”33 In 1601, the “Description de las Indias del Ponente” depicted Canton, not on the Pearl River, but on the “R. Ganges,” showing also “Bengala” with its own river.34 Mercator and Rughesi’s Tavola XXII (1597) bridged the space between the Indus and the Ganges, or perhaps the Brahmaputra (this is not always clear) by introducing a third river originating in Yunnan, the Mandus.35 Joan Blaeu saw the Ganges emerging from Imaus Mons and entering the sea in Bengal at the port of Satgaon (called by the Portuguese Porto Pequeno)—a false Ganges coming from Chaul suggesting confusion with the Indus—but also flowing by way of Chittagong; this, his true Ganges.36 There were exceptions, this time from Italy and Spain. An anonymous nautical atlas of 1562 from Messina showed two rivers in the delta, one being Rio Ganges.37 Two planispheres of 1529, Diego Ribero’s from Seville and Girolamo da Verrazano’s from Rome, also depicted “Ganche Rio”—unconnected to any river flowing through China, Cambodia, or Laos—as one of the streams flowing from Imaus Mons and a “Gangem f.” bisecting India into India intra Gangem Fluvium comprising Vijayanagar and Goa, and an India extra Gangem Fluvium consisting of Bengal and Pegu.38 The Cosmographie Blaviane of 1663 echoed this twofold division as “Estats du Grand Mogol” and “Inde Orientale,” the new category for India Extra Gangem.39 It was Portuguese explorations in the Bay of Bengal in the sixteenth century that most challenged the Ptolemaic scheme. Highly realistic, their maps usually rejected Ptolemy from the start. In the Cantino Planisphere

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of 1502, a copy of a Portuguese original, Ptolemaic influence nearly disappears in favor of more recent knowledge. In the so-called Hamy map of about1502 as well as in the sketch map of Bartholomaeus Columbus of I503, a peninsula appeared between the Indus and the Ganges. Representation of Indian Ocean coastlines in the Wolfenbuttel map of 1509 differed from that of most contemporary printed maps and, resting exclusively on Portuguese, Arab, and Asian information, indicated nowhere a trace of Ptolemaic influence.40 The new model was not universally accessed, largely because the greater part of Portuguese maps were censored, and kept locked from public view. The forces impinging on cartography in early modern Europe were much more complex than the notion of power-knowledge allows for; access to knowledge was only one of the complex sociolegal dimensions structuring cartography’s development.41 So Ptolemy’s Nile scheme, deriving from his revision of Marinus of Tyre’s projection of the inhabited earth—of the southern part of Africa extending far to the east making the Indian Ocean an inland sea with Ethiopia facing India—predominated during the Renaissance. This Nilotic mountain-lake model influenced the mapping of the Ganges delta.42 The Ganges Delta Figure 3.1, depicting the original Ptolemaic scheme for the delta, shows five openings or “mouths”: Kambyson, Mega Sagar, Kamberikhon, Pseudostomon, and Antibole, dotting the Bengal coast. There being no extant versions of original Ptolemaic maps, such maps are actually Renaissance reproductions. Knowledge of fluvial shifts strained this scheme in the sixteenth century, and portolan maps documented the actual riverscape. Fries’s Tabula Nova Utriusque Indiae, Venice, 1522, showed two rivers and a single basin, and yielded to the atlas format thereafter: Diogo Homem’s Universal Atlas, 1565, and Fernão Vaz Dourado’s Atlas Universal, 1571, are examples of the atlas format. Another type—the realistic Atlas Miller circa 1518 and the Magini-Porro maps—depicted the Brahmaputra–Meghna delta. This last river, Ibn Battuta’s Blue River, emerged as a major pathway at this time, and Magini-Porro named the third mouth—the second Ptolemaic mouth of “Mega Sagar”—not as Ruscelli’s “Magnum Palura,” but as “Magnu” or Meghna. Until the eighteenth century, as the Ganges shifted eastward through the new Padma–Meghna river system, old rivers decayed and minor chan-

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Figure 3.1. Gangeticus Sinus, Harley Collection. Accessed March 17, 2013. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/PtomelyAsiaDetail.jpg.

nels became six new major rivers. These were incorporated into Fries’s, Gastaldi’s and Ruscelli’s reeditions of Ptolemy’s Tabula Asiae X in 1525, 1548, and 1561, the first from Strasburg and the rest from Venice.43 The five-mouthed delta now showed “Adamas fl.,”—identified with Orissa’s Subarnarekha River—to the left that flowed through an unnamed mouth into Sinus Gangeticus. Magini-Porro’s versions of Tabula Asiae X reconciled the Adamas, unrelated to the Ganges, with Ptolemaic formulations, making it the sixth mouth. As geographical information increased, the

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source of the Ganges was confused with that of the Brahmaputra—another river of gold—originating in Tibet (it is still disputed whether the Ganges rises in the northern or eastern Himalayas). But Ortelius rejected Ptolemaic formulations altogether and showed Bengal enclosed by two rivers: the “Guenga” and the Chaberis fl., the latter marked in Coronelli’s 1692 map as “Fiume Marthaban.”44 Many seventeenth-century mapmakers abandoned this problematic delta, turning their attention to the Indus basin instead. Joao Texeira Albernaz’s Atlas and the Atlas Universal of 1630 and 1643 applied current principles of hydrography there. The Brahmaputra’s hydrography became clearer when Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, traveling in Bengal in the second half of the seventeenth century, observed brick bridges on the Kadamtali and Pagla rivers. These, along with the Lakhiya—important channels of Portuguese activity—entered Coronelli’s 1692 map, testifying to the speed with which new geographical knowledge was now accessed and put to use within Europe. After Ptolemy: Mythic Lakes in Alien Mountains The delta was now satisfactorily constituted, but one problem remained: if the Ganges did not originate in Paradise, where was its source? The Himalayas were still unknown, Rennell’s eighteenth-century Bengal survey only saw “Tartarian Mountains” in opposition to earlier depictions as the Caucasian, Taurus, or Imaus Mons. Ptolemy had interrogated the eastern Himalayas and radically differentiated between the Himalayas and the Tibet-Yunnan plateaus, finally confirmed by Hedin’s early twentiethcentury explorations.45 His Ganges rose in the Emodes/Imaus Mons and flowed into the Sinus Gangeticus, while China’s rivers flowed into the Sinus Magnus.46 The Cosmographia, following Ptolemy and Strabo’s Geography, book 15, noted: “India is bounded on the north from Ariana to the eastern sea, by the extremities of the Taurus, which by the natives are severally called ‘Paropamisus’ and ‘Emodus’ and ‘Imaus’ and other names, but by the Macedonians ‘Caucasus.’”47 The post-1561 “Le peninsole indiane (India intra Gangem e India extra Gangem)” depicted coastal Bengal and Arakan as a continuous strip, cut through by one major channel descending from Caucasus Mons.48 Since rivers supposedly flowed from a single source, it had to be a lake. Once the originary river system was discredited, the originary but mythic Lake Chiamay appeared in Botero’s Regnum Chinae, circa 1596, and in

Figure 3.2. Mercator-Hondius Latin folio atlas India Orientalis, Amsterdam, 1606. Accessed November 27, 2015. http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/ pritchett/00maplinks/mughal/mercatorc1600/mercatorc1600.html.

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Figure 3.3. Detail, Vincenzo Coronelli, Impero del Gran Mogol, Venice, 1692. Accessed November 27, 2016. http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/ 00maplinks/mughal/miscmaps1600s/coronelli/coronelli.html.

Ramusio and Gastaldi’s Terza Ostro Tavola of 1603–16. The many lakes of Tibet (numbers varying) entered cartographic discourse, Botero’s and Linschoten’s maps of 1596 showing seven and three lakes, respectively, among them a “Chiama Lacus” north of South Asia and west of China.49 Having mapped a flexible basin system, the Ptolemaic scheme now morphed into an equally flexible lake–mountain system echoing the mountains of the moon and the three lakes of the Nile. This scheme persisted throughout the seventeenth century. Lake Chiamay was seemingly the source of four large rivers: the Indus, Ganges, Mekong, and the Yangtze. Called Chia Hu in Matteo Ricci’s world map of 1602, four parallel rivers rose here: the An-i-Ho (Ganges), which “receives thirty streams and carries golden sand,” another (either the Karatoya/“Caor” of early modern maps, or the Brahmaputra) flowing

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through eastern Bengal, a third, the Upper Yangtze—River of Golden Sand—which passed through Burma and united with a fourth unnamed river before reaching the sea.50 As explorers discovered more rivers, the lake and rivers—their number constantly increasing—shifted: Mercator and Coronelli showed five rivers (figures 3.2 and 3.3) and Blaeu six. New rivers appeared: the Aerawady, Dharla, Chao Phraya, Brahmaputra, Mekong, Fiume Caor, Fiume Cosmin, Fiume Pegu, Fiume Ava, and Fiume Menam.51 This numerical variation was partly due to some new features that now appeared on maps. A three-part classification of geographical features on contemporary maps contained “essentials,” “details,” and “extras.” Essential geographical information defined the region’s basic topography: coastlines, lakes, and rivers, vegetation, political boundaries, settlements. The second set of information qualified or detailed essential features: estuarine waters versus the open sea and navigational landmarks; settlements, forts, temples, pagodas, and mosques. The third category contained extra optional features; examples from Renaissance maps include the extent of regularly frozen seas, direction of river flow—seasonal or subterranean, and so on. By 1640, over seventy separate geographical features had been shown, compared with fourteen or so features found on the maps in the manuscript and early printed editions of the Geographia.52 The new rivers were a part of these “extras.” The Ptolemaic Model Evaluated While not altering the course of mapmaking in Europe, Ptolemy remained the unquestioned authority for Renaissance mapmakers who, even while revising ancient geography, regarded him as the model of ancient wisdom. His system, largely discredited today as inaccurate and arcane, was revolutionary for his time, showing a northward projection with the application of longitude and latitude. Ptolemy has been accused of a fallacy that haunted Europe until the Portuguese explorations—the closed Indian Ocean—forcing Columbus to go west to seek Asia. Washburn cites Posidonius on Hanno’s expedition, arguing that the closed model was a copyist’s error, that established geographic knowledge in Ptolemy’s time did not assume a closed ocean; if anything, it assumed the possibility of circumnavigating Africa.53 Vesconte’s portolan world map of 1311, showing an open sea with rhumb lines segueing into the ocean–sea and separating Africa from India and China, reinforces Washburn’s argument.

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Ptolemy discarded the circumambient ocean and the river–sea, seeking instead independent sources for the Nile and the Ganges. Contrary to received wisdom, he separated India and Africa by two gulfs, one sea, and various continental regions.54 He rejected the biblical notion of the rivers of Paradise and also distinguished between the Himalayan range and the Tibet-Yunnan plateaus. Ptolemy’s world cartography—the imitation of the known world with all things connected with it—facilitated the first wave of globalization; through space–time compression he showed the possibility of conceptually accessing the world from the Mediterranean. Maps speak not only of the source of their authority—of the power that through patronage systems brings them into existence—but also of the relation of that power to the land they depict. The world could be bounded by linear, physical limits— coastlines, rivers, valleys, mountains—by climata, human settlement, or simply through knowledge. Ptolemy was the first to use scientific cartography to integrate diverse choreographic and topographic features into a coherent geographical space and thus generate a consistent geographical narrative.55 Ptolemaic maps were not immutable containers for universal history, but provisional documents portraying a moment in time, to be filled with data from new discoveries.56 His concern to restore ancient toponyms underlying Greek transcriptions was central, rather than positing relative location or manipulating latitudes and longitudes. Ptolemy’s coastlines were devised from sailing routes running parallel to the coast, not absolute locations. Fundamental was his stubborn attempt to build a quasi-complete geographical system of the “known” earth based on fragmentary, casual observations of travelers. This resulted in problematic conversions: of sailing times into sailing distances in order to construct a universal system of coordinates and of sailing routes into coastlines in order to create complete and reliable continents and maritime borders. His preoccupation with complete river systems falls into the same category. He could not permit any loose ends to show.57 It is thus we should evaluate Ptolemy. Ptolemy mixed imagination with current knowledge and, where he could not corroborate his information, he filled in the blanks by applying current principles of hydrography. The novelty of his hydrological model was that it could—and did—accommodate an infinite number of rivers in the Sinus Gangeticus. So the Ganges traversed India, then went “beyond” India to Laos, Cambodia, and finally to China for three hundred years, such was its power on the cartograph-

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ic imagination, thereby reconciling the Ptolemaic model with biblical geography. Conclusion This chapter has distinguished between abstract and navigational knowledge, highlighting portolanos and nautical charts as portraying coastlines more accurately than the lavish Renaissance atlas maps. It also emphasizes creativity. Lacking adequate knowledge, Ptolemy conceived of a sufficiently flexible basin system that had the potential—as geographic knowledge advanced—of accommodating multiple rivers and channels. It is often difficult, Harley noted, to tell from the historical context whether a map’s silences are the result of deliberate acts of censorship, unintentional epistemological silence, or a mixture of both, or merely a function of the slowness with which cartographers revised their maps to accord with realities. Nevertheless, information was quick to reach Renaissance Europe. Fra Mauro noted a whirlpool to the east of the Bay of Bengal, “very dangerous for sailors.” In reality, the northern Bay coast is ruled by cyclones and treacherous currents. Echoing the famous navigator Ibn Majid, Fra Mauro saw the “shadows” in the western Indian Ocean, a region of dark and dangerous seas: the Arabic Bahr al-Zulma or Zulumat (Sea of darkness), and al-Bahr al-Zifti (Sea of pitch). Instead of seeing cartographic practices as derived from purely political and economic impulses, some amount of cartographic autonomy was maintained here in order to highlight effects of knowledge on spatial fabrications.58 Maps are archives, not just examples of power-geometry, and a networked translocal space binds a particular locality into wider relations and processes.59 However, maps alone do not tell the whole story, the accompanying text is equally important. Both forms describe world geography but have different medial qualities and use different strategies to convey meaning. The text presents information in a linear order, the map is a two-dimensional hybrid of textual and graphical signs. Although closely connected, reading a text or comprehending a map requires different methods; most maps are parts of manuscripts and therefore in close relationship with texts.60 It has been said that Ptolemy’s maps make little attempt to represent political geography, so one cannot even tell from his maps which districts belonged to the Roman Empire.61 Yet with Rome and the Mediterranean at the center, Ptolemy’s overall design does make a strong geopolitical statement.62 Maps are archives, not just examples of power-geometry, but they

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are also never ideologically neutral, whatever their use or consequences of their use. They could never be mere tools of any power system’s authority. Relationships between maps and power, and between maps and other forms of knowledge, were constantly changing, entering into systems of relations with other representational practices and, in so doing, altering the meaning and authority of the others. The contribution of cartography in the maintenance of authority was never a constant factor.63 When Ptolemy’s design was revived in Renaissance Italy, his maps certainly appealed to humanists and antiquarians, but served no self-evident political purpose—their political imperatives were outdated, and their value fitted uneasily into Harley’s model of cartographic power.64 But one value remained. During the First Global Age from 1400 to 1800, the reappraisal of Ptolemy’s geographical notions confirmed that space could be conquered and the world depicted for action; so global geographies, despite introducing other regions into a global arrangement, retained a Eurocentric perspective defining the position and value of all others.65 This facilitated the “rise of the west” and the age of new global, oceanic, empires.

Chapter 4 The Global and the Maritime Divergent Paradigms for Understanding the Role of Translation in the Emergence of Early Modern Science Robert Batchelor

In his book The Swerve, about the Renaissance rediscovery of Lucretius, Stephen Greenblatt adopts the Ciceronian and indeed biblical trope of translatio studii to explain the birth of the modern world. In this classical conception, translation and in fact world-creation occurs as a relatively linear and sequential process of textual transmission. More obscurely the method relies on the idea of worlds or globes, specifically urban clusters of power and knowledge (urbi et orbi, to the city and to the world), which texts can resurrect. Such clusters move forward in time in the form of another trope translatio imperii. Thus Chrétien de Troyes argued in the twelft h century that distinct worlds of learning (siegle) traveled through books that followed the course of empire from Greece, to Rome, and finally (for Chrétien) to France. In Greenblatt’s modern world, the historical path leads from the villas of the late Roman Republic to the monasteries of the Holy Roman Empire and finally to the humanist libraries of Florence. Other imperial lineages of the modern—traditional ideas of a Renaissance due to an influx of Greek Byzantine scholars or more recent arguments about engagement with Islamic science and the textual transmission of 75

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the caliphate—follow a similar pattern trailing back to Greco-Roman world-making.1 Is it possible to make an argument about the emergence of early modern science that does not follow such well-worn paths back to the urbs and imperial center of Rome and thus replicate the orbis or global? The maritime offers a different paradigm of translation, one based on repositories of navigational skill and wayfinding rather than domination of territory, the sea rather than the land. Such knowledge repositories were multipolar in character rather than aiming to re-create the centralized and spherical model of the imperial orbis. The maritime practitioner mapped out routes—paths or traces—through which knowledge could be assembled based on relationships first to natural phenomena and then to mathematics. Deep in the third part of volume 4 of Science and Civilization in China, coming to the question of navigation a decade and a half into his project, the historian Joseph Needham framed the emergence of maritime science in a rather starkly stadial conception of the “three ages of pilotry.”2 Although it is now recognized that rafting or boating skills as well as counting and the use of string predated the Neolithic Revolution in agriculture by 40,000 or even 70,000 years and that fishing settlements may indeed be responsible for sedentary settlement, stockpiling, memory devices, and the formation of cultic sites, a paucity of sources on early navigation makes revisions to the Needham model difficult.3 In his primitive age, the individual pilot navigated by natural signs. A quantitative age followed (ca. tenth to the nineteenth centuries in East Asia; ca. thirteenth to fifteenth centuries in Europe) in which terrestrial measurement using the compass and chart took hold along with increasing skills in numeracy and tabular computation. Finally, in the mathematical age (Europe from the sixteenth century), a bevy of instruments and charts along with techniques like “great circle” navigation coupled with a more formalized geometry, trigonometry, and algebra created the modern world of sailing. This kind of formulation— gradual with a sharp break occurring at the mathematical age—seems to be what Ferdinand Braudel had in mind when he argued that of the “modern” technologies of gunpowder, printing, and the compass, only ocean navigation created “asymmetry on a global scale.”4 Needham’s maritime model, with its depths of technological development, literacy, and numeracy reaching across oceans, is in some ways at odds with his civilizational one. Recent Paleolithic archaeological discoveries have highlighted this tension, revising landed- and agrarian-centered narratives in favor of symbolically mediated behavior associated with

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shells used as strung beads. These appear in asymmetrical and temporally discontinuous sites of collection possibly as evidence of the need for maintenance of maritime networks at times of early demographic surges of coastal and riverine populations.5 The much later figure of the pilot, who like Noah can mediate between nature—considered as a collection of signs or “seamarks”—and the technology of the ship itself, deserves reconsideration in this regard. The fourth-century Buddhist storyteller Āryaśūra described these kinds of travelers in the “Tale of Supáraga,” or “he that crosses easily to the other shore.” The Buddha had once been a pilot, an ideal pilot with a collection of all possible skills. Through knowing the movement of the stars, the Great One was never confused about the position of the directions. Well-versed in normal, incidental and miraculous omens, he was skilled in the order of timely and untimely events and proficient in recognizing sections of the sea through clues such as fish, water-color, terrain, birds and crags. Alert and in control of weariness and sleep, he could endure the exhaustion brought on by cold, heat, rain and other afflictions. Vigilant and brave, he delivered merchandise to its destination through his skill in drawing into land, steering clear of obstacles, and other talents.6

Even though by the time of the story the Bodhisattva pilot is too old to see effectively, the crew still wants him present because he had set up a pattern for collecting and ordering maritime space. Without him, the sea remains unpredictable, a place thrashed by gales and turbulent waters, where snake spirits and demons live (asuras). With him comes a geography of seas, each with its own characteristics, in the form of an itinerary or map that can be memorized. The pilot’s virtuous action and knowledge of the truth (satya) transforms the sea from a space of snakes into a space of jewels. The story marks the transition from a mythic figure of the pilot, a kind of socially distributed navigational subjectivity bound up with “cognition in the wild,” to the person that maps with “the sea inside.”7 The first sea chart is no ideal orb, trying to recover a sense of lost imperial unity, but a compilation or stockpiling of linked knowledge from multiple sources, often in diverse languages, arranged in numeric logics, and tied explicitly to the question of truth. This kind of cognition tends historically to be appropriated by empires in their efforts to create unified and universal understandings of space and

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time—the global. Such understandings distance sovereignty from an older and more physical sense of territoriality and the geometry of the agrarian field. Reliant on the stargazing skills of mariners and their sensitivities to relative motion, empires wanting to achieve a sense of the global had to bring such skills onto land by making them virtual and incorporated into educational practice.8 By the eighth and ninth centuries, the spherical technologies of empires enabled cosmologies to emerge that could in a more scientific manner define and indeed tabulate both space and time. Celestial spheres became courtly showpieces for the Tang dynasty in China and the Abbasid caliphate in the Middle East, both of which drew much of their power from dominance of opposite ends of Central Asian silk roads. In Baghdad, the Persian zij (‫ )زيج‬tradition of enumerating and tabulating data was coupled with various instruments for measuring celestial spheres in an effort to shore up the Ptolemaic tradition. The “encircling sea,” a dangerous “sea of darkness,” surrounded a predominantly terrestrial rather than aquatic vision of earth.9 By comparison, the kind of synthetic work practiced at Tang dynasty Chang’an relied on a now lost literature about the oceans, a series of at least seven Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) texts beginning with hai zhong (海中, amid the sea), a phrase interpreted variously as Chinese mariners, people living on islands outside of China, or overseas Chinese.10 Paper and Buddhist techniques of woodblock printing could re-create this sense of being “amid the sea” virtually, marking the centrality of the empire. In imperial centers like Chang’an and Baghdad, it thus became possible to develop the global in a technical sense, a simplified yet functional mathematical model and set of instruments and texts that could be used in educational settings. In neither case should these projects be seen as “revolutionary” or disruptive. They aimed to employ and disseminate a sense of the global to reconstitute a vision of empire in which oceans remained a barrier to power. Diffusion of such ideas through translations of texts and instruments was followed by a localization of cosmologies in urban centers and religious institutions by the thirteenth century, across Eurasia, a process closing texts off from an active relationship to their various sources.11 What then of the pilot-navigator? The virtual and centralized global diverged sharply in this period from the material and relative maritime to the point that the old notion of the global—the centralized and scientific practice of defining space and time—began to show cracks. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, compasses came into widespread albeit uneven use in maritime navigation, an indication of the problem of creat-

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ing reliable routes to connect a fragmented and virtualized cosmological world. George Hourani in his famous account of Arab seafaring suggested that because of clear skies, the compass played only a secondary role to celestial navigation, but the spread of the compass in the Indian Ocean remained closely tied to an array of relatively constant navigational practices for maintaining course.12 Indeed, the concept of navigation as a practice of multiple skills supplemented by instruments became a cliché in Song dynasty China, as in Zu Yu’s statement in his Pingzhou ketan (ca. 1117): “Ship masters know geography, at night they observe the stars, in the day they observe the sun, when cloudy they use the compass (‘south pointing needle’).”13 Needham called this “quantitative navigation.” It required significant advances in both literacy and numeracy among pilots, paralleled by the rise in accounting and the spread of the zero to China and Europe in the same period. Such changes occurred away from imperial centers and seem to have been driven by needs for longer distance navigational techniques, an increasingly multilingual environment on ships, and commercial accounting as a mode of managing uncertain relations over time and space.14 Around the fourteenth century, oceans and seas started to take up more space on maps as entities known to pilots, perhaps in emulation of Mongol ambitions to global empire but most obviously in a post-plague effort to regain the kinds of stability previously achieved through the territorial aspirations of entities like the Abbasids or the Tang dynasty or more distantly Rome and the Han. Even though Marco Polo, in the context of Ceylon, mentioned seeing a “mapemondi des mariner” in the late thirteenth century, the ocean began to occupy a significant portion of most world maps only in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.15 The map of Abraham Cresques (1375), despite a predominance of land, illustrates this transition by departing, like the portolan chart, from a circular model and by depicting the Indian Ocean and the jewellike islands of Indonesia as open oceanic space. The Korean Kangnido Map (ca. 1402) also marks an important departure, with fully half the space of the map in a strikingly bright blue. In the early fifteenth century, even the Timurids with their renowned observatory recognized that a mere territorial empire in imitation of the Mongols could no longer successfully dominate exchange patterns and routes. The Timurid historian and ambassador ʿAbd al-Razzāq Samarqandī’s Maṭlaʿ-i saʿdayn va majmaʿ-i baḥrayn (The rise of two auspicious planets and the mingling of two oceans, 1466, 1470) put forward the notion of the majmaʿ-i baḥrayn (mingling of the two oceans), which became a

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metaphor for the intermixing of Moslems and Hindus.16 Oceans in Abdur Razzaq’s formulation were explicitly a majmaʻ, a meeting place, a place of concourse or assembly where messages were exchanged. This conception of the Indian Ocean as an “interregional arena” represented a very particular historical problem for empires. It engaged not only the short-lived Timurids but also their historical successors—the “Gunpowder Empires” of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals—as well as the Ming with the Zheng He voyages.17 This intensely networked maritime world presented the Portuguese, and later the English and Dutch, with a talented labor force that could quickly bring them up to speed on everything from directions between ports to the location of reefs and sources of commodities. It is this level of infrastructure, upon which a new mathematics could be built, that helps explain their unlikely successes. As G. R. Tibbetts pointed out in relation to fifteenth-century Arab navigational texts from East Africa, notably Ahmad Ibn Mājid’s frequently copied Kitāb al-fawāʻid fī uṣūl ʻilm al-baḥr wa-al-qawāʻid (Book of the advantages and principles of the science of the sea, 1490 CE), “Practically all the Portuguese place names can be equated with an Arab name—certainly all the major places.”18 Ibn Mājid’s earlier long poem Ḥāwiyat al-ikhtiṣār fī uṣūl ʻilm al-biḥār (Compilation of the principles and science of the seas, 1462 CE) marks a useful date for the revival of navigational thinking as an ‘ilm ( ‫“ علم‬science” or “knowledge”) related to both celestial and compass techniques as well as knowledge of wind, weather, and currents. His most famous successor was Sulaymān ibn Aḥmad al-Mahrī (d. before 1553), who lived in al-Shihr (Ash-Shihr, Yemen) in the early sixteenth century and knew the area between Aden and Zafar particularly well.19 Both Ibn Mājid’s and al-Mahrī’s texts detail places in Southeast Asia and China up to the Fujian port of Quanzhou. For the Ottomans, such ungoverned networks represented a problem that needed to be solved. The Ottomans had been drawn into the Red Sea even before the conquest of Egypt in 1517 to manage the trade and pilgrimage routes in the region. Despite the fact that only the Atlantic part of the famous Piri Reis chart (1513) survives, his later writings make clear that the more important region was the Indian Ocean. His maps became a presentation gift in 1517 to Sultan Selim I upon the conquest of Cairo and the grant of the title Defender of Mecca and Medina. The Portuguese, who had captured Hormuz and Muscat in 1507 and Aden in 1513, only added to the pressure to manage the seas. As Giancarlo Casale has argued, Reis represented a key turning point in Ottoman cartography, one in which oceans

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mattered.20 Although the shift was most visibly linked with the Mediterranean portolan methods of the Portuguese, Italians, and others, the collecting of navigational routes and locations by Indian Ocean scholars like Ibn Mājid and Al-Mahrī as a science (‘ilm) was equally if not more important in terms of both actual data and the political tensions underlying imperial maps. Serious conflict with the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean only began in 1538 with the failure of an Ottoman attempt to retake Diu, the most heavily fortified part of the Portuguese Empire, by the governor of Egypt Hadim Suleiman Pasha. Diu was a strategic overstretch encouraged by political weakness in Gujarat and the kind of mapping Piri Reis had done twentyfive years earlier. Undeterred, Suleiman Pasha moved to solidify Ottoman power over Zafar (Zufar or Dhofar), Aden, and Mocha, key maritime ports for independent seaborne merchants, essentially taking over Yemen and introducing Ottoman bureaucratic structures.21 By the 1560s, the most dynamic centers of Arab navigation at Aden and Yemen chafed under Ottoman rule. Yemen rebelled, and Qutb al-Din al-Nahrawali, chronicling the events, accused the long-dead Ibn Mājid of disloyalty in helping Vasco da Gama find routes through the western Indian Ocean that did not follow the coast.22 Maritime cooperation with the Portuguese by Arab pilots, a suspect group in imperial eyes, had come to inform a number of myths about the dangers posed in rejecting Ottoman sovereignty. At the same time, on the other side of the Indian Ocean, Aceh on Sumatra began to look to the Ottomans for help in managing maritime relations. Aceh traded with Aden and elsewhere along the Arabian coast from at least the 1530s, employed Turkish soldiers starting in the same period, and finally sent ambassadors to Istanbul starting in the mid-1560s as tensions rose over maritime trade.23 On Ottoman urgings, the Achenese besieged Malacca in 1568 and again in 1570 and 1575, only to be defeated by a Portuguese alliance with the Malay Sultanate of Johor. Selim II (1566–74) sent cannons as well as forging technology to Aceh, calling it a vilâyet or province, although a promised fleet had to be diverted to suppress the rebellion in Yemen. This cluster of maritime events seems to be the origin of the first explicitly maritime map made in one of the gunpowder empires, the Indian Ocean map in the Ottoman Deniz Atlasi (ca. 1560–80) (see figure 4.1).24 The date of the atlas is usually given as 1580, but its map of the Indian Ocean employs a vision of the ocean that would have emerged in the late 1560s and 1570s. The initial impulse is global, the first pages including a European-style world map with various maritime locations labeled with Turkish

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Figure 4.1. Maritime map of the Indian Ocean, Deniz Atlasi [ca. 1570], Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, W. 660, f. 2b-3a. Annotations © Robert Batchelor.

names in Nastaʿlīq script. The portolan-style Indian Ocean map that follows splits the Indian Ocean into two halves by centering on the island of Malé in the Maldives (1), a sultanate from which the Portuguese after fifteen years of occupation had been driven out in 1573. The impulse seems strategic, aimed at envisioning Ottoman relations across the Indian Ocean, rather than instituting an empire of the sea. Just northeast of the center of the map is Ceylon or Serendib (‫سيالن‬   , 2), an island riven by civil war in this period, where the Portuguese had a base at Colombo (est. 1518, rebuilt 1554). To the west, the map names six ports in the maritime space surrounding the western Indian Ocean—Aden ( ‫ عدن‬, 3), Socotra ( ‫ سقطرى‬, 4), Mascate (‫مسقط‬   , 5), Hormuz (‫هرمز‬, 6), Diu (‫ ديو‬, 7), and Bombay (inscription illegible, 8)—defining the strategic logic of the Ottoman navy to the west in relation to the Portuguese. To the east, the map labels Sumatra (   ‫   شمطره‬, 9) and Java (10), showing the spice islands trailing off to the southeast. These labels largely duplicate those on the world map, allowing a kind of zoom between global and oceanic scales. As with earlier maps, the atlas as a whole was most likely educational

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in purpose, but the recognition of maritime space is striking. The Ottomans seem to have been receiving their strategic information from two directions—from the Venetians and from the Acehnese. Aceh sought to work with the Ottomans to become a regional power that could replace the former strength of Johor, a polity that appears on the map only as a chain of navigational islands to the east of the Malay Peninsula that provide the route to Ming China (11). While the implicit trade routes to reach Southeast Asia along island chains may derive from a Venetian or Portuguese source, the routes do not follow the same patterns as European maps and seem focused on Islamic areas, including a large unnamed island to the northeast that is likely the distant Brunei on Borneo, Jolo in the Sulu Archipelago, or Maguindanao on Mindanao (12). The map simultaneously shows the increasingly integrated world of Indian Ocean and South China Sea trade that had emerged by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the ways that both Portuguese and Ottoman policies encouraged fragmentation into regions beset by warfare, thus representing a strategy based on administrative units and fortified ports rather than maritime commerce. As an indirect result, earlier regional centers of significant navigational knowledge, notably Yemen where al-Mahrī lived and Johor where the Portuguese had first encountered Malay cartography, fell into obscurity and their archives vanished. If the Ottoman map is juxtaposed to the earliest known Safavid world map (figure 4.2), which also dates to around the 1560s, some very interesting commonalities emerge in terms of conceptual engagement with the Indian Ocean and Western Pacific. Previously known Safavid world maps have all been in the form of Mecca-centered brass astrolabes produced by one workshop in Isfahan around 1700. These were based on data collected in Timurid astronomy tables at the Samarquand observatory and compiled at Kish in the early fifteenth century.25 A legacy of Mongol scientific exchanges and administrative practices, such instruments were primarily used for qibla finding, the direction of Mecca for prayers. They became popular status symbols in Safavid Iran during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and would probably not have been used for navigation.26 This mid- to late sixteenth-century Safavid world map would, like the astrolabes and the Ottoman map, also have been of little use for navigation and probably used in the context of a literary education, but it suggests a very different orientation than Mecca. The earliest surviving example of it is placed somewhat randomly in a sixteenth-century copy of the ʿAjāʿib al-makhlūqāt (Wonders of creation), a thirteenth-century Arabic text by

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Figure 4.2. Safavid World Map. In ʿAjāʿib al-makhlūqāt va-gharāyib al-mawjūdāt [Wonders of creation and marvelous possessions], sixteenth century, Persian scribe, Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, W. 593, f. 52b-53a.

the Persian scholar Zakariyāʿ al-Qazwīnī. The text was composed during the Mongol Ilkhanate but based on an earlier text made for the last Seljuq Sultan Toghrul III by Muḥammad ibn Maḥmūd ibn Aḥmad-i Ṭūsī. The book itself is at some level a fantasy about the vast territorial reach and cosmological vision of the Seljuqs and the Mongol Ilkhanate as their successors. But the map, placed about a quarter of the way through, was new and

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Figure 4.3. Janí. Safavid World Map collected by Engelbert Kaempfer [ca. 1684–85] British Museum, London, 1974, 0617, 0.1.35. Annotations © Robert Batchelor.

dates from the sixteenth century. Even though elements like the encircling sea retained a sense of traditional medieval geography, the map depicts a novel and indeed contrasting maritime vision for the Safavids.27 Scholars have thought this map to be by an Iranian exile at the Ottoman court. However, a newly discovered second map, an almost exact copy made in Isfahan in 1684 for the German traveler Engelbert Kaempfer, calls this into question (figure 4.3). Kaempfer’s was a cheap copy, the indigo watercolor and gold paint in the elegant manuscript in the Walters Gallery copy replaced by an ink wash and gold watercolor tracing with hastily done, albeit at times more legible, Persian calligraphy. The commission as part of Kaempfer’s album indicates that the map was still popular in late seventeenth-century Isfahan and part of a copyist’s repertoire for tourist

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albums. The presence of the 1684 map in Isfahan suggests that the map in the al-Qazwini text is actually an early Safavid map, which may or may not have ended up in the Ottoman court. The map centers on Safavid cities but broadens into a world picture. In the center, it shows the old Ilkhanate capital of Tabriz ( ‫ تبریز‬, 1), and then southwest to the sixteenth century Safavid capital Qazvin (‫  قزوین‬, 2), to the       , 3). This was the pre-Isfahan empire of Shah cultural center of Shiraz (‫شی راز‬ Tahmasp (1524–76) and his successors, reformed and centralized by Abbas I (1588–1629), an empire that competed with the Ottomans on land and for trade through the Persian Gulf. As a modern world map, it includes the Pacific (4) as a kind of south sea along with a very rough indication of North and South America, including Panama. As with the Ottoman map, Southeast Asia is depicted, but more iconographically in a tradition that goes back to Muhammad al-Idrīsī (1100–1165), as a chain of islands with Islamic sultanates leading to southern China (5). In this case, the large ocean spaces suggest the ways that the extension of Islam into Southeast Asia was a decidedly maritime phenomenon, and one in which the South China Sea, Java and Banda Seas, and the western Pacific more generally represented a frontier rather than a limit. On Kaempfer’s late seventeenth-century copy, paper labels for oceans and rivers have been added, most likely because in the original they were hard to see in the large areas of indigo-colored water, as evident on the Walters version. These too highlight the importance of such bodies of water, which also increasingly connected the scattered followers of Shi’ite Islam and the potential diplomatic reach of the Safavids. Beyond the Ptolemaic climate bands and the expected density of place names near the Safavid Empire itself, clusters of names appear in Morocco, southern Arabia and East Africa, and the Bay of Bengal. The Moroccan and Yemeni groups were Zaidis, and there was a strong presence of Shi’ites originally from Persia or Yemen in East African cities as well. The Safavids for religious and geopolitical reasons related to tensions with the Mughals maintained ties with the Golconda Sultanate (1512–1687) ruled by Shi’ite Twelvers. Golconda also had ties across the Bay of Bengal with Persian merchant settlements along the Tenasserim coast of Siam and in the Thai Empire based at Ayutthaya.28 So despite the general interconnectedness displayed by the oceans on this map, the clusters of names reveal a regionalism rooted in a sense of fractured religious unity. Although using vastly different mapmaking techniques, the long-term push toward a fractured regionalism thus represents a commonality with the Ottoman maritime map. Not merely a reaction to Portuguese navigation in the Indian Ocean

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and western Pacific, regional strategies attempted to broaden the imperial power of the Ottomans and Safavids into maritime space through diplomatic (including arms sales) and religious means, respectively—global imaginaries that drew little from the actual maritime dynamics enabling them. The Fujianese “Selden Map of China,” written in Minnan using Chinese characters can also be understood in this context of increasing regionalism, but unlike the Safavid map and in a less centralized way than the Ottoman map, it depicts an active dimension of maritime navigation through the explicit tracing out of an entire system of trading routes (figure 4.4).29 Drawn for an overseas merchant sometime between 1607 and 1619, it has a substantially different provenance than the courtly and educational Safavid and Ottoman maps from the 1560s. The Selden Map is the only surviving Asian maritime map from a period dominated by imperial mapping of the oceans by both European and Islamic powers that does not see like a state. It depicts more directly the maritime trading world that flourished in East Asia after 1568, when the overseas trading prohibitions of the Ming state were significantly loosened. The Selden Map’s relation to the Indian Ocean, a cartouche showing routes from Calicut on the western edge of the map (1), remains puzzling and revealing when juxtaposed to the Ottoman and Safavid examples. A series of instructions, presumably copied from a now lost Chinese rutter, give directions from Calicut in India to three ports, Aden (阿丹国, Adan guo), Zafar (法兒国, Far guo), and Hormuz (忽魯謨斯, Hulumosi). Of these, while Aden and Hormuz were still active, albeit diminished from the struggle between the Ottomans and Portuguese, Zafar had been at its height in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The map in this way depicts a longer-term canonization in the rutter tradition of connections between the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asian maritime spaces. In the fourteenth century, the traveler Ibn Battuta visited Zafar twice, once on his way from Kilwa north around 1331 and then again following the route on the Selden Map from Calicut in 1347. He was struck by its isolation, a month’s journey from Aden across the desert or a twenty-eightday journey across to Calicut by sea. The frankincense and the quality of Arabian horses deserved note, but he also included a long passage about orchards with banana trees, palms supporting betel plants, and coconut palms, which he understood to be transplants from India. The coconut he compared with the date, but emphasized its versatility, mundane uses (milk, oil, and sugar) and indeed maritime properties, such as the produc-

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Figure 4.4. Selden Map of China [ca. 1607–1619] Bodleian Library, Oxford University, MS Selden Supra 105. Annotations © Robert Batchelor.

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tion of coir rope or his claim to have survived on coconuts for over a year in the Maldives.30 That such plants—Asian palmyra, the cabbage palm, the coconut palm, the acrea (betel) palm, and the areng (sugar) palm as well as banana—also appear at the bottom of the Selden Map (2) under the cartouche seems to indicate that this fourteenth-century exoticism had by the seventeenth century become an emblem of what joined Southeast Asian waters to the Indian Ocean economically and ecologically. Both betel and coconut were imported in large enough amounts to be taxed by the Ming, according to juan ten of the Dongxiyang kao (1617). Their presence on the Selden Map suggests their now more general status as part of a landscape of commodity agriculture, having been transplanted through traders in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea to various locations to serve as supplemental food, supplies, and export products to support the growing cities of the early modern era. This increase in commodity agricultural production represented the substantial aspect of the ocean regionalism or “circuits” described by Kirti Chaudhuri, depicted in different ways on these three maps for the period between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries.31 The three maps themselves suggest in different ways how regionalism shaped the development of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Ming empires. This early modern shift, which Europeans (the English, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and to a lesser extent the French) by necessity had to transcend, also meant an intensification of the practice of quantitative navigation in more limited zones, as depicted by the Selden Map. In East Asia, private maritime trade driven by luxuries transitioned to an increasing reliance on regional maritime trade to support larger populations in the Ming Empire, the centralized territorial states of Southeast Asia, Japan, and the Philippines, and the port cities of Southeast Asia more generally. At the same time, because the major centers for acquiring silver were overseas—Nagasaki (3), Manila (4), Batavia (5), Banten (6)—exports of luxuries out of the Ming Empire could be very profitable. Long-distance merchant diasporas subsumed under “gunpowder empires” like the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals, such as the Arab traders of Aden and Yemen or the merchants of Gujarat, saw significant losses in trade as Europeans arrived and East Asian regionalism intensified. In the process, traditional linkages between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea broke down. For the gunpowder empires, regionalism increasingly meant supporting religious and geopolitical networks as can be seen in the Ottoman and Safavid maps. It would be wrong to call this decline. The gunpowder empires were a triumph of territorial over maritime orga-

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nization, productive neither for the virtual innovations of cosmographers nor the more dynamic innovations of the maritime world of the Indian Ocean and Western Pacific in the seventeenth century. The activities of the Fujianese diaspora depicted on the Selden Map and elsewhere meant that Ming China, early Tokugawa Japan and several Southeast Asian polities like Siam and Aceh followed a different pattern. East and Southeast Asia buoyed the relatively minor regional merchant polities centered on London and the Dutch cities into global navigational powerhouses, and their merchant families profited as well, until the Canton system restructured trade again under the Qing in the eighteenth century. Where did European “webs of empire,” as Alison Games has described English “cosmopolitanism,” come from? The process was neither one of civilizational divergence between East and West nor one of translatio imperii, the internal march and expansion of Western civilization.32 In particular, the Portuguese first and then the English and Dutch in different ways leveraged what Abdur Razzaq called majma‘—the great assembly or meeting of different navigational traditions. This early modern meeting of traditions gave impetus to a final shift from the quantitative to the mathematical, to use Needham’s terms. What drove forward early modern navigational science and, perhaps even more broadly, mathematics were not particular cultural or religious “civilizations” or “worlds” but precisely the opposite, dense maritime interactions and translations, the stockpiling action of emporia ports. Greater informational complexity demanded new techniques both at the level of the virtual, to visualize and instrumentalize data and processes, and at the level of the relative, to create new strategies for producing and translating data. Translation in this sense largely involved a range of nonlinear and nonimperial processes that are no longer easy to see, having left little trace in the archives. While maps as a kind of interface may not give a full sense of the multitude of languages involved or the calculations made, in their spatial aspects they reveal at least in part the nature of the navigational and commercial webs that gave birth to widespread numeracy.

Part II Constructing Society

Chapter 5 Charting China in the Thirteenth-Century World The First English Translation of Zhu fan zhi and Its Recipients in China in the 1930s Huei-Ying Kuo

I sent you a manuscript copy of Chau Ju-Kua’s [Zhao Rugua’s] text. How do you think about publishing it in English conjointly with me? . . . Chau JuKua’s work . . . may be looked upon as the chief representative of the ethnographical information brought to China by the Arabs during the twelft h and thirteenth centuries. It seems to me that we are fully as indebted to Chinese records for matter-of-fact information regarding the ocean trade of the [F]ar East as to any of the contemporaneous Arab or Christian authors.

In January 1904, the Dean Lung Chair of the Department of Chinese Studies at Columbia University, Friedrich Hirth (1845–1927), invited W. W. Rockhill (1854–1914) to cotranslate the thirteenth-century Chinese text, Zhu fan zhi (Chu-fan-chȉ) into English.1 Receiving this letter at the Bureau of American Republics in Washington, DC, Rockhill agreed. Moving beyond the original goal of translation, the project developed into a substantial study. The two American “China hands” had to locate the ports of call 93

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visited by foreign merchants en route to China, and identify the origins of the merchandise that they carried. The final product of the research, published by the Imperial Academy of Science in St. Petersburg in 1912, can be read as an atlas of the thirteenth-century world. It bears a lengthy title: Chau Ju-kua: His Work on the Chinese and Arab Trade in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Entitled Chu-fan-chȉ.2 The original author, Zhao Rugua (1170–1228), was superintendent of maritime trade in Song China (960–1279). This was similar to the position in which Hirth himself was working when the idea of translating Zhao’s text into English first occurred to him in 1890. At the time, Hirth was stationed at Chinese Maritime Customs in Danshui (Tamsui), Taiwan. The version of Zhao’s text that he read was based on the one found in Li Diaoyuan’s (1734–1803) Han hai (Sea of documents). During the following five years, with the assistance of British Consul E. H. Fraser in Chongqing (Chung-king), Hirth translated most sections of the book. The manuscript drafted by 1895 became the foundation for his further collaboration with Rockhill.3 As for Rockhill, the Philadelphia-born, St. Cyr graduate, his diplomatic career seems to have outshone his academic achievements. His first position in China was as an unpaid staff member at the American legation in Beijing in 1883. By the time that he agreed to cotranslate Zhu fan zhi with Hirth, he had become a well-known Tibetologist and Sinologist, an expeditionist to Tibet and Mongolia, the brains behind the American open-door policies, and the U.S. commissioner responsible for negotiating with the Qing Empire in the aftermath of the Boxer Uprising in 1900. During the period when he maintained regular correspondence with Hirth concerning the Zhu fan zhi translation project, he was serving at the American Court in Beijing (1905–9), as the American ambassador in St. Petersburg (1910 and 1911), and as the American ambassador in Constantinople (1911–13).4 Reading the correspondence between Hirth and Rockhill—the primary means by which they communicated regarding the Zhu fan zhi translation project—one feels as though the original author, Zhao Rugua, is becoming their mutual friend. When Rockhill was heading off to serve at the American Court in Beijing, Hirth reminded him, “I hope you will have some time left over for poor Chau Ju-kua [Zhao Rugua] now.”5 And when the news of Rockhill’s promotion to the role of American ambassador to Russia was confirmed, Hirth sent him a congratulatory message, noting that “our mutual good friend Chau Ju-kua, of course, joins in my good wishes.”6 Why did the two American “China hands” in the European age of

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empire become interested in the foreign trade of medieval China? What did they see from mapping the linkages between port cities and industrial towns that, together, made up China’s trade networks? And how did their Chinese readers receive the Westerners’ interpretation of the Chinese text? To answer these questions, this chapter examines the main thesis of Zhu fan zhi, its English translation and annotation as well as reactions to the translators’ view from Chinese nationalist writers in the early twentieth century, especially during the Nanjing decade (1927–37). I point out Hirth and Rockhill’s disagreement with the surging Chinese nationalism of the early twentieth century. In particular, Rockhill’s friendship with Yuan Shikai (1859–1916)—primary executor of Qing China’s New Policies in the 1900s and president of the Republic of China between 1912 and 1916—spoke for the American diplomat’s views on the direction of China’s modern transformation. It was at odds with the trend among new Chinese intellectuals during the early twentieth century toward placing an emphasis on the modernization of China through Westernization, but consistent with Yuan’s attempts to retain the authority of the Chinese classics, particularly Confucianism. In light of maritime historian Takeshi Hamashita’s research on the continuing influence of overseas Chinese business networks following the collapse of the Sinocentric tributary trade system at the turn of the twentieth century,7 I argue that Hirth and Rockhill developed their thesis in order to project a new inter-Asian order, one in which overseas Chinese and other sojourning groups—Arabs being the focus of special attention by the authors—participated in cross-cultural trade without any attempt to subjugate others. I compare this thesis with what might be described as surging Chinese nationalist thought, including Liang Qichao’s (1873–1929) aspirations for a resurgence in Confucian culturalism during the 1900s and an emphasis on territorial nationalism during the Nanjing decade. Surveying Fan The original author of Zhu fan zhi—Zhao Rugua—was born into a Song royal household. The Zhao family moved from Bianjing (present-day Kaifeng), the capital of North Song, to Tiantai in Taizhou, Zhejiang, when the Jurchen invaded Bianjing in 1127. After passing the civil service examination and obtaining a juren degree, Zhao Rugua became superintendent of maritime trade in Quanzhou, Fujian. Zhu fan zhi was based on interviews that he conducted with foreigners who had come to Quanzhou.8

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In the preface, Zhao states that his motivation for writing the book is to advance Chinese knowledge about the world. Models for his writing include Yu Gong (Tribute of Yu, a chapter of the book of documents, one of the five classics of ancient Chinese literature), Shan hai jing (The classic of mountains and seas), and Zhang Hua’s Bowu zhi (Record of various things; compiled in 290 CE). Zhao’s curiosity motivated him to record information concerning the geography, legends, fauna, and flora of the lands that he studied. While he emphasized that he was only presenting information that “retained the truth,”9 his descriptions of exotic things were based on the norms found in China, the latter referred to either as Zhongguo (the Middle Kingdom), hua 華, or by way of references to the preceding Tang dynasty (618–960). During the period when Zhao was writing, Korea and Japan were under the direct influence of Chinese legal and other intellectual authorities. The closest country by sea was Jiaozhi.10 Zhao begins his account of this country by pointing out that the king of Jiaozhi has a Tang surname, and by pointing out that the people of Jiaozhi eat the same kind of food and wear clothes to similar those of the Chinese. “The difference, however, is that the men and women over there were all barefoot.”11 In Zhancheng, Jiaozhi’s southern neighbor, officials imposed taxes on people who collected spices in the forests, “just as China levied a per-head tax on people trading salt.”12 Further south lay Zhenla, adjacent to the southern border of Zhencheng and east of Pugan. In Zhepo, there was a kind of tree that “hua people had never seen.” Bananas and cane sugar like those in Zhongguo could be found in Sujidan, a subordinate region of Zhepo.13 Zhao classified foreign lands outside China as the terrain of the fan蕃. The westernmost place that a Chinese ship from Quanzhou would visit was Dashi 大食, which was “a variation of the Persian race.”14 From Dashi, “ fan ships found it hard to launch a direct journey [to Quanzhou]. It took about forty days for a Dashi ship to reach Lanwuli. After wintering there, the [Dashi ship] would need another sixty days under favorable winds to reach its destination [Quanzhou].”15 Lanwuli is thus the midpoint on the yearlong voyage between Quanzhou and Dashi. And the monsoon traders would build connections within and between the various port cities along the route. East of Lanwuli, most countries formed direct tributary ties with Song China. Among these Song vassal-states, Sanfoqi was the most important transshipment center for Dashi merchandise sojourning in the region.16 The tributes that Sanfoqi submitted to China—pearls, frankincense, rosewater, gardenia flowers, myrrh, aloes, asa-foetida, putchuk, liquid

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storax, elephant tusks, coral-trees, cat’s-eyes, amber, foreign cotton, sword blade—were “all products of all the varieties of fan from Dashi.”17 East of Lanwuli was the terrain where the “Dashi jiaodu 大食教度,” or religious observances of Dashi, constituted the core of the civilization. Networks of Dashi merchants connected vast territories as far west as Mulanpi, which was “located across a gigantic ocean west of Dashi, and could be reached by gigantic ships from Dashi. Launching a ship from the state of Duopandi, one would navigate westward for more than one hundred days [before reaching Mulanpi]. Each ship could accommodate many thousands of people.”18 Between Mulanpi and Lanwuli, other countries that had adopted the Dashi religion and order also included almost all the countries to the west of the “threatening Jicini.” This long list included Mojailie, Wulisi, Baida, Jishi, Majia, Wuba, Bipaluo, Zenba, and Kunlun Cenqi, among others. Beyond these particular states, Zhao’s record also documents the presence of Dashi merchants in the “rigorous Buddhist state” of Nanbi.19 Missions from Dashi also joined the tributary embassy sent from the states of Bintonglon20 and Pugan.21 In addition, the strict Buddhist country of Huchala, where people were prohibited to have any meat in their diet, would transship goods to Dashi.22 One transshipment center between Huchala and Dashi was Zenba. Zhao documents that Zenba was in the middle of the southern oceans of Huchala, with a big mountain bordering it to the west. The people “were all Dashi descendants, and followed Dashi jiaodu.”23 How would the people following Dashi jiaodu encounter with the people of hua? In the section of Dashi, Zhao Rugua documents two Dashi merchants in China. The first was the legendary 130-year-old Wuxihuluhua. Based on an old legend from Guangzhou, Wuxihuluhua “claimed that he had admired the royal system when he was still afar, [so he] came here by boarding a ship from the Guluoguo to come here.”24 The other was Shinawei, sojourning in the south of Quanzhou. Citing the work of a precursor customs inspector Lin Zhiqi, Zhao described Shinawei as “someone who was generous, fond of philanthropy, and who acted in a western-earth style, and set up a cemetery in the southeastern corner of the city wall so as to hide the corpses of those foreign merchants.”25 It was not clear whether Zhao implied these two Dashi merchants in China can represent the general view of people from the region of Dashi jiaodu. In Zhao’s view, was there a hierarchical relationship between the two terms? Or were they simply being used to differentiate that which lay inside the kingdom of Song China from that which lay outside its boundaries?

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Translating Fan The translators had to decide whether the boundary between fan and hua was delimited according to culture, political authority, or both. Should they translate Zhu fan zhi using “a transcription of the Chinese title,” or by something that could “tell the reader right away what sort of book he may expect”?26 To put it directly, the question was whether to translate the term fan literally as “barbarian,” rephrase it as “foreign countries,” or transcribe it as “Dashi.” In relation to Zhao’s reference to foreigners in Quanzhou as zhu (many) fan (barbarians), Hirth did not consider this as “indeed to be derogatory” to this group.27 He explained his reasoning to Rockhill: “The term ‘Barbarians’ would certainly be applicable to the Ta-shi [Dashi] as described by Chau Ju-kua. Fan 蕃 [the first fan], according to Kang-hi,28 stands for fan藩 [the second fan], a fence, and means ‘those beyond the boundary.’ It seems that the range of the work is the Arabic Ocean Seas.”29 In other words, the translators finally settled on the strategy of considering fan as a term referring to those foreign merchants who came from the seas, especially Arabs from the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf.30 They concluded that Zhao called the Arabs fan (the first fan), or “barbarians,” because they came from beyond the Chinese border. In their view, the Chinese idea of fan, at least as presented in Zhao’s writing, did not carry the sense of hierarchical racial disparaging. Figures 5.1 and 5.2 show some proposed titles of the translation project. Through translating and annotating Zhao’s text, Hirth and Rockhill developed their own thesis concerning Arab dominance among China’s maritime contacts. In the Introduction, they point out that the oceanic networks converging in China were established “through the continued energy and enterprise of the Arabs and Indians.”31 Regarding the founding of the position of superintendent of maritime trade in Hangzhou (spelled as Hang-chou by Hirth and Rockhill) and Mingzhou (Ming-chou) in the tenth century, Hirth and Rockhill point out that this was “done at the request and for the convenience of the foreign [Arab] officials.”32 Dashi, which Hirth and Rockhill define as the “Arabs and Arabs colonies,” was the most important player.33 They also lay out the chronology surrounding the discovery of maritime routes to China by the Arabs, tracing this history back to the beginning of the first millennium: “It seems evident that, during ancient and medieval times, the sea-trade between Egypt and Persia on the one side, and India and the Far East on the other, remained

Figure 5.1. A Tentative Title for the Hirth-Rockhill Project. Source: Hirth to Rockhill; New York, February 8, 1911. MS Am 2122 (47), Houghton Library, Harvard University. Author’s photo.

Figure 5.2. A typeset of a tentative book cover for the Hirth-Rockhill project. Source: Hirth to Rockhill; New York, March 30, 1910. MS Am 2122 (37), Houghton Library, Harvard University. Author’s photo.

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nearly exclusively in the hands of the enterprising Arabs of the southern Arabian coast, who, in very early days, established stations at all the principal ports-of-call along the coast to the south of the Indus and thence ultimately to Canton where . . . they appear to have had a settlement or colony as early as A. D. 300.”34 It was only in the seventh century that Chinese seaborne enterprise “began to manifest itself.”35 In short, whereas Zhao’s original work related to the lands south of China and the fan from the west, Hirth and Rockhill drew attention to the Afro-Eurasian connections set up by networks disseminated from Dashi, the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258). Locating Fan Hirth and Rockhill deliberated in relation to their views about the contemporary geographical locations of the foreign lands in their footnotes. For example, they placed Lanwuli (Lan-wu-li), considered as the midpoint for the yearlong voyage between Quanzhou and Dashi, at or near the site of modernday Banda Aceh. Jiaozhi (Kiau-chȉ) roughly corresponded to the northern part of present-day Vietnam. Zhanchen (Chan-ch’ὃng) was Champa in Cochinchina, while Zhenla (Chön-la) referred to the Khmer Empire. Sanfoqi (San-fo-ts’i) was Srivijaya in southeastern Sumatra, and Zhepo (Shö-p’o) was located in central Java. These were the countries that bordered Nanyang, the present-day South China Sea. Among the ring of cities and territories under Dashi influence that included Ta-ts’in (Baghdad), Ssi-lién (Siraf), P’u-hua-lo (Bokhara) and Ts’öng-pa (Zanzibar), Pi-p’a-lo (the Barbary Coast), Wu-pa (Sohar), Yung-man (Oman), Ki-shȉ (the island of Kish), Ma-kia (Mecca), Pi-ssi-lo (Basra), Ki-tz’i-ni (Ghanzi), and Wu-ssȉ-li (Misr, Egypt).36 Overall, Hirth and Rockhill’s emphasis on Quanzhou’s contacts with fan merchants and diplomats from the Indian Ocean is consistent with the recent scholarship on the Afro-Eurasian connections. For example, Hirth and Rockhill pointed out that Muscat in Oman at the mouth of the Persian Gulf was a starting point for monsoon traders navigating toward Asia from the Dashi world. Abu-Lughod has pointed out that this route contributed to the unification of the Arabian-Persian world under the auspices of the spread of Islam between the seventh and tenth centuries.37 Engseng Ho suggests that this path channeled Arabian trade to China up until the sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258.38 Hirth and Rockhill’s idea about Zhao’s use of fan—an ethnic marker to distinguish but not to discriminate

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Figure 5.3. The geography of Zhu fan zhi, according to Hirth and Rockhill. Source: Friedrick Hirth and W. W. Rockhill, Chau Ju-Kua: His Work on the Chinese and Arab Trade in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Entitled Chufan-chï (St. Petersburg: Printing Office of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1911). Inside back spread. Author’s photo.

against those non-Chinese people in Quanzhou—also accords with the studies on China’s cosmopolitanism before 1400.39 One of the places for which Hirth and Rockhill could not be sure of the location was Chabisha (Ch’a-pi-sha). Zhao documented that the country was located in the area “where the sun goes down.”40 Hirth and Rockhill nonetheless managed to identify its location using the Arabic terms, Djabulsa, Djabirso, or Djaborso, locating it somewhere in the western part of the the Arab lands. Through locating each place on a world map, Hirth and Rockhill helped readers make sense of the political and cultural boundaries of the thirteenth-century world. The map shown in figure 5.3 provided additional information that had not been mentioned in the book but was important to readers in the early twentieth century, such as the locations of Beijing, Shanghai, and Nanjing. It did not, however, present the layers of tributary ties, the boundaries between different religious zones, and the waterways reported by Zhao’s interviewees.

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Locating the World of Zhi fan zhi in the Age of Nationalism In the very same decade that Hirth and Rockhill were working on their Zhu fan zhi project, the pioneering Chinese nationalist scholar Liang Qichao was also paying attention to the oceans south of China. In his essay, “Zhongguo zhimin bada weiren zhuan” (Biographies of eight great Chinese colonial pioneer heroes), Liang frames the seagoing Chinese merchants from southern China that were active between the late fourteenth and early nineteenth centuries as “Chinese colonial pioneer heroes.” Seven among them hailed from Guangdong, while two came from Fujian Province. They conquered indigenous peoples in Sumatra, Borneo, Malay Peninsula, and the Philippines. 41 In calling them “colonial pioneer heroes,” Liang was trying to underscore the credentials of the southern Chinese and their overseas counterparts in leading political reforms in China. As Liang went into exile overseas after the aborted attempt at constitutional monarchy in September 1898, he sought support from overseas Chinese to restore China’s political situation. Together with the Japanese pan-Asianist belief that China’s hopes rested on those southern Chinese who were settling abroad, Chinese reformists such as Liang and their revolutionary counterparts all tried to obtain financial and other forms of substantial support from overseas Chinese. The majority came from Fujian and Guangdong.42 Like Liang, Hirth and Rockhill understood the importance of Fujian and Guangdong in the context of China’s global connections. Quanzhou, where Zhao Rugua was based, was located in Fujian. The main references used in compiling Zhu fan zhi—Zhou Qufei’s (1135–89) Ling wai dai da (In answer to questions concerning the area beyond the mountain range) and Zhu Yu’s Pingzhou ketan (Some records concerning Pingzhou; completed in about 1119)—document foreign trade in Guangzhou, the provincial capital of Guangdong.43 In a way, academic endeavors promoting understanding related to the long history of China’s foreign contact in these two provinces—whether in the translation of Zhu fan zhi by Hirth and Rockhill or in Liang’s development of a thesis on overseas Chinese migrants from Fujian and Guangdong—may have helped elevate the status of those migrating from the two southern Chinese provinces. These were the overseas Chinese, who by this time were deemed outsiders, if not outcasts, with respect to China in the eyes of Orthodox Confucian mandarins.44 Unlike Liang, Hirth and Rockhill did not consider the development of nationalism in China to be the preferred option. Before the final collapse of Qing, Hirth once hoped that the ephemeral campaign for constitutional

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monarchy led by Emperor Guangxu (Kuang-sü) in 1898 would lead to the revival of the empire. In his words, “There is a rumor among the Chinese here that the Empress Dowager intends to hand over government to Kuangsü again and that Chinese New Year will see the new parliament started. Perhaps the wish is father to the thought, and we shall do well to wait till we see it.”45 This hope vanished when Emperor Guangxu died in November 1908. Rockhill also believed in the feasibility of reforming Qing. He disagreed with the Chinese revolutionaries and the new political party, the Guomindang (Kuomindang; hereafter referred to as the GMD), that they established. He criticized the revolutionaries for their failure to understand the main obstacle to China’s political and economic modernization. The problem came from the Qing court’s “financial embarrassments,” and not from the reluctance of Qing leaders such as Yuan Shikai.46 The respect was mutual. In 1914, in his capacity as president of the Republic of China, Yuan invited Rockhill to be his foreign adviser.47 When he heard of Rockhill’s death, Yuan told Admiral Cai Tingkan (1861–1935) with “a choked voice and reddened eyes” that “I am deprived of a true friend and China of a strong supporter by the death of Mr. Rockhill.”48 As for the GMD, Rockhill considered that its members were “composed of very young western-educated idealists, who knew nothing of China and were still intoxicated with the political and social theories they had heard of but very imperfectly understood in the schools from which they had but recently come, together with a certain number of old types of Chinese who knew nothing but the China of the past.”49 The China of the past, and the author who documented it, caught most of the attention of reviewers assessing Hirth and Rockhill’s cotranslation project. A book review in the New York Times, “Old Chinese Book Tells of the World 800 Years Ago: Chau Ju-kua’s Chronicles of the Twelfth Century,” features a map adorned with a dragon that symbolizes China. The discussion focuses on the Chinese view of the world during the thirteenth century, the far-reaching business networks that existed before the rise of the West in the sixteenth century, and China’s failure to develop into a resilient maritime empire after the sixteenth century.50 The Sun in New York City also published an article with an emphasis on the book’s original author, Zhao, “A Wise Chinaman Was Marco Polo’s Predecessor.” In the text, Zhao is compared with the Malacca-born late Qing diplomat Wu Ting-fang (aka Ng Choy; 1842–1922), a member of the Chinese elite at the time.51 Even a book introduction posted in the Bulletin of the American Geographical Society tries to catch readers’ attention by highlighting Zhao’s

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Figure 5.4. A map included in E. H. Parker’s book review of Chau Ju-kua. Source: MS Am 2122 (105), folder 3 of 5, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Author’s photo.

royal heritage, making reference to his status as “eighth in line of descent from Emperor Tai Zong [Tai-Tsung].”52 The Nanjing Decade and the China That Once Colonized the Seas The type of “young western-educated idealists” among the nationalists and GMD partisans that Rockhill disagreed with nonetheless shaped the intellectual and political agendas of China. After the rise of the iconoclastic New Culture/May Fourth Movement in the late 1910s, nationalism developed into antiforeignism. And the direction of the modernization in Chinese education favored pragmatic and secular learning.53 What developed concomitantly was the uncritical imitation of Western/Japanese colonial aspirations. Jiang Jieshi, the leader of the Nanjing regime, called for the expansion of Chinese influence overseas. One substantial agenda involved the exportation of Chinese industrial goods to the South Seas (present-day Southeast Asia). As Japanese goods were the most competitive in the South Seas markets, the boycotting of Japanese goods became a patriotic act, with Nanjing launching “buy Chinese” movements.54 Intellectual writings published by Shanghai’s Commercial Press, World Press, and the newsletter of the South Seas Culture and Business Research Center of Jinan University,

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Nanyang Monthly, concurred to a greater or lesser extent with state policies.55 Most of these writers and publishers were based either in Shanghai or Nanjing, the power base of Jiang’s regime. These studies can be classified into two groups, the first adopting Liang Qichao’s term, “Chinese colonization,” developing it into a general thesis about the achievements of the Chinese people at large,56 and the second framing the subject within the prism of an integrative world history of “East-West exchanges.”57 The first group that adopted the concept of colonization presented a much longer history of Chinese maritime expansion. Studies falling into this group thus cite Rockhill and Hirth’s Chau Ju-kua only scantly, based on their perspective that such texts deal with only one section of a history of overseas Chinese expansion spanning two thousand years. For example, in the inaugural issue of Nanyang Monthly, published in 1927, Zheng Hongnian (1875–1958), principal of Jinan University, claims that “those who discovered the South Seas were we Chinese.”58 He argues that the pioneering Chinese journey began during the Han dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE), and that Chinese had established settlements in Singapore by the Tang dynasty (618CE–907CE) at the latest. This perspective concerning unique and specific aspects of Chinese involvement in trade and migration in the South Seas characterizes writing in this group, based on what might be called the thesis of Chinese colonial endeavors. Writing in 1928, Hu Bingxiong extended Liang Qichao’s thesis. He doubled the number of pioneering Chinese colonizers from Liang’s eight to sixteen. Hu argued that although Chinese southward expansion started later than eastward expansion to Korea and westward expansion to Uighur, these colonial efforts “all exemplified that Chinese [hua-ren] were rulers of other countries.”59 Overseas Chinese had assimilated with many local peoples throughout the vast South Seas region, both in the four major island territories of Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and the Philippines, and in the four main peninsular zones, including Burma, Vietnam, Siam, and Malaya. In some countries, such as Annam (Vietnam), southern Chinese migrants also spread Confucian civilization. Liu Jixuan (1895–?) and Shu Zhizheng (1896–1978) repeated the thesis and timeline of Chinese southward colonization. Concluding that “the so-called South Seas is indeed the South Seas of the Chinese,” Liu and Shu further credited all Chinese people for colonizing the region.60 The writings of Li Changfu (1899–1966), a geographer and faculty member at Jinan University, are consistent with the thesis of Liu and Shu. At first, Li was not sure about whether the case of Chinese southward migration to

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the South Seas fit the definition of colonization. His main concern was the lack of Chinese governmental support for the migrants.61 A year later, in 1930, Zhu Xie (1907–68) translated by way of abridging German geographer Heinrich Schmitthenner’s Der geographische Typus der chinesischen Kolonisation. Zhu cites earlier writing by Li Changfu, introducing the thesis of nonpolitical economic colonization.62 The work also draws similarities between Chinese southward colonization and German expansion to the Baltic Sea or Greek expansion to the Aegean Sea: “Chinese colonization in southeastern Siberia and the Southern Islands did not come with the support of any state power. This kind of colonization was not grounded in any economic or political superiority, but [driven by] by excessive population [growth] in the homeland and absolute strength in ruling over its neighbors.”63 Later, Li revised his earlier position, titling his new book Zhongguo zhimin shi (Chinese colonial history). In the book, he locates the beginning of Chinese colonization in the Tang dynasty (618–907).64 And he gives credit for Chinese southward colonization to all of the people of the Chinese nation and not only those departing from Fujian and Guangdong. For Li, the combination of private risk-taking endeavors and the official tributary system accounted for the success of long-term Chinese colonization. Li points to the far-flung influence of Chinese trade in the Afro-Eurasian littoral in explaining the presence of Arab trade in South China.65 This can be understood as a counter-thesis to the perspective of Hirth and Rockhill. The second group of Chinese studies during the Nanjing decade challenged the geographical information that Hirth and Rockhill provided in Chau Ju-kua. Feng Cheng-jun came up with his own approach to verifying the geographical locations along the transcontinental and maritime silk roads. Being a student of Paul Pelliot, Feng translated many of Pelliot’s writings into Chinese, including Pelliot’s review of Hirth and Rockhill’s translation of Zhu fan zhi.66 According to Feng’s translation, Pelliot criticized Hirth and Rockhill for having overlooked earlier Chinese maritime connections before Arab influence began. For example, citing Ban Gu’s (32–92 CE) Qian Han Shu (Book about the early Han dynasty), Pelliot argued that Chinese seaborne trade had reached the Indian Ocean by that time.67 Pelliot also believed that the country of Yetiao that dispatched a tributary mission to China in 132 CE was Java, and not somewhere near Cochinchina. This showed the Chinese capacity for making connections with countries via offshore navigation as early as the beginning of the millennium.68 In other words, Pelliot was suggesting that the Chinese were able to directly access Indian Ocean trade without the support of Arab

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merchants. The purpose in discerning the exact locations of the ports was thus to make clear who—Chinese or Arabs—pioneered navigation across the Indian Ocean and South Seas before the expansion of European powers during the long sixteenth century. What Hirth and Rockhill considered as a hub port for eastward-bound Dashi merchants, Mulanpi, in Pelliot’s view, might refer to the Chinese name for a popular medical ingredient, guipi (cinnamon bark), but not the place called Murabit in Southern Spain, according to Hirth and Rockhill.69 In 1940, Feng published his own annotation of Zhu fan zhi, which further criticized the Hirth–Rockhill thesis.70 Feng disagreed with the assumption that people with the surname Pu in Srivijaya were the descendants of Arabs. He believed that Pu was a title for Malay noble elites.71 In the same vein, Feng argued that the merchant Pu Luxie, reported to have carried out a tributary mission on behalf of the Borneo emperor Xiang Da in 977, should have the common Malay aristocratic surname of Abdullah, not the Arabic name Abu Ali.72 This narrowed the scope of Quanzhou’s foreign connections, suggesting that they did not extend to Dashi in the Indian Ocean, but were limited to Sanfoqi in an area bordering the South Seas. By making this modification, what Hirth and Rockhill considered an expansion by Arab merchants during the golden years of the Abbasid Caliphate became an ungrounded claim. Feng also questioned the way in which Hirth and Rockhill moved the section of Zhu fan zhi dealing with Hainan Island—which Zhao had included as an appendix to his volume 2 on merchandise—to the last section of volume 1 on foreign countries. In his words, “The island of Hainan, which has been incorporated into China proper from the Han dynasty, should not be listed among those barbarian countries.”73 What might explain Hirth and Rockhill’s decision to rearrange the chapters was that Hainan Island was adjacent to Annam, a vassal state of China. It might also be because Hirth and Rockhill understood that the Chinese had only achieved partial control of Hainan.74 To be sure, throughout Zhu fan zhi, Zhao commented on the incomplete civilization of the indigenous peoples in South China and Hainan. Feng, however, considered Hainan Island to be an integral part of Song China proper as much as it was part of the territory of the Republic of China. Feng realized that his goal of aligning political borders with cultural boundaries was incongruous with the thirteenth-century world order according to Zhao Rugua. He thus raised the fundamental question as to whether or not Zhao’s notes could be viewed as conveying accurate knowledge for understanding China in the thirteenth century

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world: “Although this [Zhu fan zhi] was the only document that researched and verified the barbarian countries along the seas to the west and south of Song (lands), and although this book was widely cited by Wenxian tongkao [General surveys of documents; compiled by Ma Duanlin between 1273 to 1322] and Song shi [History of Song], there were many mistakes. The reason was that Zhao Rugua did not personally visit those places. He either cited from his earlier writings or interviewed merchants from afar. . . . The categories of Daqin, Tianzhu and Dashi . . . are all very confusing.”75 The Waterways to Quanzhou in the Thirteenth Century: Chinese South Seas or Arab Lake? The above analysis touches on three historical moments in which Quanzhou’s maritime connections during the thirteenth century were documented, understood, and represented. The first moment was in the thirteenth century, when Zhao interviewed Arab merchants sojourning in Quanzhou. Zhao presented Song China (using the terms Zhongguo and hua) as the primary reference point for understanding foreign (fan) people, as well as their religions, merchandise, and geographical locations. The second moment was during the early twentieth century, when Hirth and Rockhill tried to introduce the maritime world during Zhao’s time to the Western intellectual world. The two American China-hands revealed that Zhao’s Quanzhou was a meeting point for sojourning merchants from geographical regions that were home to adherents of key religious blocs, including Muslim Dashi, Persian Daqin, Hindu Tianzhu, Buddhist Zhenla, and Confucian Zhongguo. A Chinese nationalist of their time, Liang Qichao, however, framed the dissemination of southern Chinese influence across the seas using the concept of colonization. Liang’s thesis became further adapted and extended by Chinese scholars in the third moment, the Nanjing decade. Scholars such as Li Changfu and Feng Chenjun (1885–1946) narrated the history of Chinese overseas trade and migration as manifesting China’s expansion. The assumption was that the spread of Chinese civilization was a one-way process, from north to south, as well as across the seas. And unlike the Hirth–Rockhill thesis concerning Chinese maritime contact with Arabs and other sojourning merchants across the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal, and the Persian Gulf, Chinese scholars during the Nanjing decade paid most attention to the region east of the Straits of Malacca. The implication here was that those pioneering navigators across the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf,

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the Bay of Bengal, as well as the South China Sea, were Chinese and not Arabs. To borrow the thesis of Prasenjit Duara, the nationalists in Nanjing decade were in need of creating a new discourse to narrate the past. Its goal was not so much to reveal what actually happened during the nation’s premodern past (before it became unified), as to create a new narrative for making sense of the nation’s ongoing agenda.76 I argue that Hirth and Rockhill’s understanding of Song China in the maritime world of the thirteenth century was not solely derived from their nostalgia for the China of the past, but also connected with their aspirations for the China of the future, a future in which the Qing agenda of introducing constitutional monarchy had succeeded. Given that Chinese antiquity was congruent with cosmopolitan influences, the attempt to replace antiquity with Western cultural endowments for China’s modernization—an agenda that many new Chinese intellectuals in the early twentieth century favored—was thus unnecessary, if not misleading. The work of Hirth and Rockhill helped reveal trade and diplomatic circuits, both within and outside the political sanctuary of Sinocentric tributary ties in Asia before European colonization, but they did not join in the chorus calling for the construction of a Chinese colonial history. The late Benedict Anderson reminded us of the importance of constructing a linear discourse about a nation’s history, so that the people residing within the territorial limits of the state could associate their individual fates with the collective past, present, and future prospects of the nation. In his words, the agenda of nationalist history writing is to fill in “homogenous empty time.”77 But, in the process of competing with Japanese and Western powers in the South Seas, Chinese nationalist writings had to do more than fill in blanks, if any such blanks still existed that were untouched by colonial forces. The Chinese nationalists tried to merge an emphasis on the continuity of the Sinocentric cultural space with the history of the spread of southern Chinese migrants. The Hirth–Rockhill thesis, which emphasized Chinese–Arab collaboration, would undermine the validity of the spatial imagination concerning the nationalist understanding of China in world history. This chapter concludes by drawing attention to the importance of looking into ideological shackles—including Western Orientalism and Chinese nationalism during the early twentieth century—that cloud our understanding of the nature of exchanges and oceanic connections across the Indian Ocean and the South China Seas, past and present. In order to examine the place of southern China in the dissemination of Chinese

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civilization across the oceans and to scrutinize the connections between Quanzhou and other port cities where merchants were based and embassies established, one needs to further investigate the layers of diasporic, religious, and cultural connections that were established across the string of port cities along the fringes of the bays and oceans of Africa and Europe prior to the rise of Pax Mongolica. At the same time, although the incongruent political and cultural boundaries of Zhao’s time seem incompatible with modern political norms, did the reminiscence for such an order in the first English version of Zhu fan zhi reflect the translators’ idea of reviving it, in their writings if not their politics? Appendix Table 5.1. Countries Listed in Zhu fan zhi. Original entry

Hirth and Rockhill’s romanization

Romanization by Pinyin system

Contemporary names according to Hirth and Rockhill

交趾國

Kiau-chi

Jiaozhi

Tonking

占城 (1)

Chan-ch’ὃng

Zhancheng

Annam

賓朣龍國

Ping-t’ung lung

Bintonglong

Panrang (Coast of Cochinchina)

真臘 (2)

Chön-la

Zhenla

Kamboja

登流眉國

Tong-liu-mei

Dengliumei

Ligor (?), Malay Peninsula

浦甘國

P’u-kan

Pukan

Pagan, Burma

三佛齊國 (3)

San-fo-ts’i

Sanfouqi

Palembang, Eastern Sumatra

單馬令國 (4)

Tan-ma-ling

Danmaling

Kwantan (?), Malay Peninsula

凌牙斯加國

Ling-ya-ssi-kia

Lingyasijia

Lengkasuka, Malay Peninsula

佛囉安國

Fo-lo-an

Foluo’an

Berganang, Malay Peninsula

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Original entry

Hirth and Rockhill’s romanization

Romanization by Pinyin system

Contemporary names according to Hirth and Rockhill

新拖國

Sin-t’o

Sintuo

Sunda, Western Java

監篦國

Kiéen-pi

Jianbi

Kampar, Eastern Coast of Sumatra

藍無里國

Lan-wu-li

Lanwuli

Lambri

細蘭國 (5)

Si-lan

Xilan

Island of Ceylon

闍婆國, 莆 家龍

Shö-p’o

Zhepo

Java

蘇吉丹 (6)

Su-ki-tan

Sujidan

Central Java

南毗國 (7)

Nan-p’i

Nanbi

Malabar

胡茶辣國

Hu-ch’a-la

Huchala

Guzerat (Gujarat)

麻囉華國

Ma-lo-hua

Maluohua

Malwa

注輦國 (8)

Chu-lién

Zhunian

Chola Dominion, Coromandel Coast

鵬茄囉國

P’öng-k’ie-lo

Pengqieluo

Bangala, Bengal

南尼華囉國

Nan-ni-hua-lo

Nan’nihualuo

Sindh

大秦國

Ta-ts’in

Daqin

Baghdad

天竺國

T’ien-chu

Tianzhu

India

大食國 (9)

Ta-shi

Dashi

The Arabs

麻嘉國

Ma-kia

Majia

Mecca

層拔國

Ts’öng-pa

Cenba

Zanguebar (Zanzibar coast)

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Original entry

Hirth and Rockhill’s romanization

Romanization by Pinyin system

Contemporary names according to Hirth and Rockhill

弼琶囉國

Pi-p’a-lo

Bipaluo

Berbera, the Somali coast

勿拔國

Wu-pa

Wuba

Sohar (?)

中理國

Chung-li

Zhongli

Somali Coast

甕蠻國

Yung-man

Yongman

Oman

記施國

Ki-shï

Jishi

Island of Kish

白達國

Pai-ta

Baida

Baghdad

弼斯囉國

Pi-ssï-lo

Bisiluo

Basra

吉慈尼國

Ki-tz’ï-ni

Jicini

Ghazni

勿斯離國

Wu-ssï-li

Wusili

Mosul

蘆眉國

Lu-meï

Lumei

Rum, Asia Minor

木蘭皮國

Mu-lan-p’i

Mulanpi

Murãbit, Southern Spain

勿里斯國

Wu-ssï-li

Wusili

Misr (Egypt)

遏根陀國

O-kön-t’o

Ogantuo

Alexandria

海上雜國 (10)

[Countries in the Sea] (11)

Hai shang zai guo

Countries in the Sea

晏陀蠻國

Yen-t’o-man

Yantuoman

Andaman Islands

崑崙層期國

K’un-lun-ts’öng-k’i

Kunluncenqi

Pemba and Madagascar

沙華公國

Sha-hua-kung

Shahuagong

Malay, Men of the Sea

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Original entry

Hirth and Rockhill’s romanization

Romanization by Pinyin system

Contemporary names according to Hirth and Rockhill

女人國

[The Countries of Women] (11)

Nuren

The Amazons

波斯國

Po-ssi

Bosi

Besi (?), Sumatra

茶弼沙國

Ch’a-pi-sha

Chabisha

Djabulsa, the Land of the Setting Sun

斯加里野國

Ssï-kia-li-yé

Sijialiye

Sicily

默伽獵國

Mo-k’ié-la

Mojialie

Mogreb-el-aksa (Maghreb)

渤泥國

P’o-ni

Boni

Borneo

麻逸國

Ma-i

Ma’i

Philippine Islands

三嶼、蒲哩嚕

San-sü

Sanyu, Pulilu

Islands of Calamian, Busuanga, Palawan

流求國

Liu-k’iu

Liuqiu

Northern Formosa

毗舍耶

P’i-shö-yé

Pisheye

Southern Formosa

談馬顏 (12)

T’an-ma-yen

Tanmayen

Botol Tobago

新羅國

Sin-lo

Xinluo

Korea

倭國

Wo

Wo

Japan

海南 (13)

Hai-nan

Hainan

Island of Hainan

Source: Hirth and Rockhill, Chau Ju-gua. Annotated by the author. (1) Zhu fan zhi provided information on dependencies of some countries. These dependencies might be states or tribes, and they might be simultaneously subordinate to two or more countries. For Chan-ch’ὃng, its eleven dependencies are as follows: Kiu-chόu (舊州), Wu-li (烏麗), Ji-li (日麗), Yūé-li (越里), Wei-jui (微芮), Pin-t’unglung (賓瞳龍), Wu-ma-pa(烏馬拔), Lung-yung (弄容), P’u-lo-kan-wu (蒲羅甘兀), Liang-pau (亮寶), and Pi-ts’I (毗齊). Hirth and Rockhill pointed out that “none of the authorities available are of any assistance in identifying the dependencies of Chanch’öng.” Hirth and Rockhill, Chau Ju-kua, 50.

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(2) Dependencies of Chön-la include Töng-liu-mei (登流眉), Po-ssi-lan (波斯蘭), Lo-hu ( 羅斛), San-lo (三灤), Chön-li-fu (真里富), Ma-lo-wön (麻羅問), Lü-yang (綠洋), T’unli-fu (吞里富), P’u-kan (蒲甘), Wa-li (窊里) , Si-p’öng (西棚) and Tu-huai-sün (杜懷 潯). Töng-liu-mei and P’u-kan appear to be in both the list here and the general list of main fan countries. Hirth and Rockhill argued that P’u-kan should not be considered as a dependency here, because “in the twelfth century Pagan was a powerful and independent state.” Hirth and Rockhill, Chau Ju-kua, 56. For the rest of Zhenla’s dependencies, Hirth and Rockhill believed that Wa-li was somewhere in Laos or Karen country; San-lo should be in north of Lopburi on the lower Menam; Po-ssi-lan was Chanthaburi (rendered as Chantbabun by Hirth and Rockhill) on the east coast of the Gulf of Siam; and Lo-hu was the modern Lopburi on the lower Menam (Chao Phraya River). The translators however could not decide whether Chön-li-fu should be in the northwest of Chanthaburi, southwest of Chönla proper and northeast of Töngliu-mei, or it could be Chanthaburi. Hirth and Rockhill, Chau Ju-kua, 52–56. (3) Most dependencies of San-fo-ts’i were located in the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra. Those in the Malay Peninsula include Pöng-föng (蓬豐) (present-day Pahang), Töngyang-nöng (登牙儂) (Trengganu), Ling-ya-ssi-kia (凌牙斯加) (Lengkasuka); Ki-lantan (吉蘭丹) (Kalantan); Fo-lo-an (佛羅安) (Beranang on the Langai River, west coast of the Malay Peninsula); Tan-ma-ling (單馬令) (in the mouth of the Kwantan river in Pahang); Kia-lo-hi (加囉希) (Ligor on the East coast of the Malay Peninsula). For those located in Sumatra: Ji-lo-t’ing (日羅亭) might be Jelatang, Jambi; Tsién-mai (潛 邁) might be Semawei in northren Sumatra; Pa-t’a (拔沓) should be Batta in northern Sumatra; Pa-ling-föng (巴林馮) was Palambang in southern Sumatra; Kién-pi (監篦) should be Kapar on the East coast of Sumatra; Lan-wu-li (藍無里) was in the northern part of the West coast of Sumatra. Beyond the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra, Sin-t’o (新拖) was in west Java, with a small part of it on the Straits of Sunda; and Si-lan (細蘭) should Ceylon, which appears on the list of main fan countries as well. Hirth and Rockhill, Chau Ju-kua, 65–66. (4) All dependencies of Tan-ma-ling—Ji-lo-t’ing, Tsién-mai, Pa-t’a and Kia-lo-hi—were also dependencies of Sanfoqi. Hirth and Rockhill, Chau Ju-kua, 67–68. (5) Si-lan is introduced in the same category of Lan-wu-li. These are two separate kingdoms. Si-lan was under the rule of Nan-p’i, and sent a yearly tribute to San-fo-ts’i. Hirth and Rockhill, Chau Ju-kua, 72–73. (6) The neighboring countries of Su-ki-tan, which were also dependencies of Shö-p’o, are as follows: Pai-hua-yüan (百花園), Ma-tung (麻東), Ta-pan (打板), Hi-ning (禧 甯), Jung-ya-lu (戎牙路; aka Great Shö-p’o 大闍婆 or Chung-kia-lu 重迦盧), Tung-ki (東峙), Ta-kang (打綱), Huang-ma-chu (黃麻駐), Ma-li (麻蓠), Niu-lun (牛論), Tanjung-wu-lo (丹戎武囉), Ti-wu (底勿), Ping-ya (平牙), I-wu (夷勿) and Nu-ku (奴孤). Among them, Pai-hua-yüan, Ma-tung, Hi-ning and Jung-ya-lu should be those independent states that flourished in the island of Java between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries: Pai-hua-yüan was probably the Pajajaran state, about forty miles from the modern city of Batavia (present-day Jakarta); Ma-tung was Medang-kamulan (rendered as “Medang-kamolang” by Hirth and Rockhill) in central Java; Hi-ning was possibly Singhasari in Malang in eastern Java; Jung-ya-lu was Janggolo in Surabaya,

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in Java’s northeastern coast. Ta-kang, Huang-ma-chu, Ma-li, Tan-jung-wu-lo, Ti-wu, Ping-ya, I-wu and Nu-ku are situated on outer islands. Ma-li should be the island of Bali; Tan-jung-wo-lo could be Tanjong Pulo in Malay or Tanjong Pura in Indian (present-day Tanjung Pulo) in north Sumatra, Indonesia; Ti-wu should be the island of Timor; Ping-ya should be Banca, situated off the eastern coast of Sumatra across the Bangka Straits. The islands of Huang-ma-chu and Niu-lun should locate around Geram, Gilolo (present-day Halmahera), Ternate or Amboyna (present-day Maluku). Tan-chung-pu-lo (丹重布囉), Pa-li (琶離), Sun-t’a (孫他), and Ku-lun (故論) were the four pirate states in the region. Hirth and Rockhill identified Sun-t’o. The latter might be Sunda, rendered as Sin-t’o in other sections of the book. Hirth and Rockhill, Chau Ju-kua, 83, 86. (7) Hirth and Rockhill identified dependencies of Nan-p’i as follows: Ku-lin (故臨) should be Quilon (present-day Kollam, in Kerala); Hu-ch’a-la (胡茶辣) is Guzerat, which also appears in the main list of fan states; Kan-pa-i (甘琶逸) was Cambay in Gujarat; Pi-li-sha (弼離沙) was probably Bharoch in Gujarat; Ma-lo-hua(麻囉華) was Malwa; Föng-ya-lo (馮牙囉) was probably Mangalore; Ma-li-mo (麻哩抹) was Malabar; Tu-no-ho(都奴何) was probably Tannah on the island of Salsette near Bombay; A-li-jo (啞哩喏) may be the country of Ras Haili or Hili between Mangalore and Pandarani; Au-lo-lo-li (囉囉哩), which they put as“Ao (or Ngao)-lo-lo ni” (啞哩喏嗷) in the footnote, should refer to Cannanore or Nellore in the Malabar coast. (Hirth and Rockhill, Chau Ju-kua, 67–68). (8) Chu-lién, P’öng-k’ie-lo and Nan-ni-hua-lo are presented in the same category as Chulién. The book provides names of thirty-two places related to Chu-lién. The translators considered them as either cities, towns, or fortresses. They were “scattered all over peninsular India, which our author probably heard of them from some Hindu, or Arab, trader.” Hirth and Rockhill, Chau Ju-kua, 99. (9) Ta-shi’s dependencies included Ma-lo-mo (麻囉抹), Shï-ho (施曷), Nu-fa (奴發), Yassï-pau-hién (啞四包閒), Lo-ssï-meï (囉施美), Mu-kū-lan (木俱蘭), K’ié-li-ki (伽力 吉), P’i-no-yé (毗喏耶), I-lu (伊祿), Pai-ta (白達), Ssï-lién (思蓮), Pai-lién (白蓮), Tsi-ki (積吉), Kan-meï (甘眉), P’u-hua-lo (蒲花羅), Ts’öng-pa (層拔), Pi-p’a-lo (弼琶 囉), Wu-pa (勿拔), Wöng-li (甕篱), Ki-shï (記施), Ma-kia (麻嘉), Pi-ssï-lo (弼斯囉), Ki-tz’ï-ni (吉慈尼), and Wu-ssï-li (勿廝離). Among them, Pai-ta, Ts’öng-pa, Pi-ssï-lo, Wu-pa, Wöng-li, Ki-shï, Ma-kia, Ki-tz’ï-ni and Wu-ssï-li all appear at the general list of fan countries with respective introduction. For the rest of Ta-shi’s dependencies, Hirth and Rockhill identified Ma-lo-mo as Mirbat on the Hadramaut coast of present-day Oman; Shï-ho as Shehr, another port on the Hadramaut coast; Nu-fa as Zufar or the modern-day Dhofar; Ya-ssï-pau-hién as Ispahan or Isfahan in present-day Iran; Lo-ssï-neï as Khwaizm in south of the sea of Aral; Mu-kū-lan as Makran between Iran and Pakistan today; K’ié-li-ki as Kalhat then subject to the prince of Hormuz; P’i-no-yé as Tunis and Tripoli on the Mediterranean coast of North Africa; I-lu in Iraq (rendered by the translators as Irāk); Ssï-lién probably Siraf on the Persian Gulf; Pai-lién as the island of Bahrein in the Persian Gulf; Tsi-ki probably the port of Tiz on the Makrān coast; Kan-meï as Comoro Islands; P’u-hua-lo as Bokhara (in present-day Uzbekistan) (Hirth and Rockhill, Chau Ju-kua, 116-7; 120-1).

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(10) Hirth and Rockhill identified the present-day countries of Andaman Islands, Pemba and Madagascar, Malay, the Amazons, Besi, Sumatra, Djabulsa, Sicily, and Maghreb al-aqsa (which they put as Mogreb-el-aksa here) that Zhao included in the entry of “countries in the sea” Hirth and Rockhill, Chau Ju-kua, 147-154. (11) Hirth and Rockhill did not romanize the “countries in the sea” and “countries of women” (Hirth and Rockhill, Chau Ju-kua, 147; 151–52). (12) Tan-ma-yen is presented as one of the two neighboring countries of Liu-k’iu. The other was P’i-shö-yé. (13) Zhao put the section of Hainan in volume 2 of Zhu fan zhi: products. Hirth and Rockhill, however, moved this section to the end of volume 1.

Chapter 6 The Case of Bingata Trafficking Textile Art and Technique across the East China Sea BuYun Chen

At the turn of the nineteenth century, Li Dingyuan, an envoy to the Ryūkyū Kingdom (1429–1879, modern-day Okinawa) from Qing dynasty China (1644–1911), observed: “The people of this country are very skillful in the printing of patterns of different kinds. They make paper stencils, apply the stencil to the fabric, and paint it with ash. After the fabric is washed, the patterns emerge in very brilliant colors. These colors do not fade, even if the garment is in tatters. They must be in possession of a production secret that they do not reveal to others. For this reason the dongyang huabu [patterned cloth of the eastern seas] is highly valued in Min [Fujian].”1 This “patterned cloth of the eastern seas” was bingata (trans. “vermilion patterns”), a polychrome-patterned textile of the Ryūkyū Kingdom prized for its vivid colors and intricate designs. As Li described, this technique of printing patterns on fabric combined paste-resist dyeing, paper stencils, and painting. First, a paste made from a cooked mixture of rice flour and bran was brushed onto the fabric as a resist agent. After the paste was applied through cut-paper stencils (katachiki), plant dyes and mineral pigments were painted onto the open spaces. This process was repeated to create shading and edging with colors. Finally, the paste was washed away, leaving a white outline around the design. The end-result was a sumptuous textile in vibrant hues of red, yellow, blue, and green (figure 6.1a–b). 117

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a Figure 6.1 (a–b). Robe with pattern of swallows, weeping cherry, and crane medallions (nineteenth century), front and verso. Yellow silk crepe (chirimen), Okinawa (Ryūkyū Islands). Dimensions: 20½ × 56 in. (52.1 × 142.2 cm). Purchase, Seymour Fund, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Harold Bach, by exchange, 1983. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Writing over a century later, the pioneer of the Japanese folk craft (mingei) movement Yanagi Sōetsu (1889–1961) experienced the same awe as Li Dingyuan when he came cross the brilliantly colored textile of old Ryūkyū (ko Ryūkyū): “If one thinks of Japanese dyeing as a whole, one’s

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b mind dwells upon the tradition of yuzen in all its variety of tie-dyeing, free painting, stencil, etc., as its finest flowering. So I thought, too, until I saw the bingata of Okinawa. Doubtless it was influenced by the sarasa (cotton prints) from the south and yūzen [resist-dyeing technique developed in Kyoto] from the north, but it transcends them, a splendid combination of design, coloring, and techniques.”2 In the twentieth century, following the annexation of the Ryūkyū Islands by Meiji Japan in 1879, bingata circulated in the visual economy of the Japanese empire as evidence of a primeval aesthetic sensibility. For Yanagi, Okinawa constituted a “handicraft paradise” where crafts continued “in a pure condition.”3

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Mingei activists found in bingata evidence of a folk craft that supported their claims about the primacy of nature, specifically the conviction that craft was founded on an unmediated and spontaneous knowledge of nature.4 This theory of folk crafts was predicated on the distinction between tradition and modernity on the one hand, and culture and economy on the other. Indeed, the definition of a Japanese modernity was contingent upon the discovery of an indigenous material culture that had yet to be corrupted by the forces of capitalist production. Handmade, produced collectively using natural and locally specific materials, and according to traditional techniques, folk crafts was the work of anonymous craftsmen who made functional, simple goods to be used in everyday life. What made folk crafts beautiful was their simplicity.5 In contrast, modern crafts reflected the egotism of the individual artist-craftsman who only produced for his “favored purchaser.”6 By relegating Okinawa to an aesthetic premodernity, Yanagi and his followers recast what had constituted specialized knowledge as common and everyday practice. In the old, independent Ryūkyū kingdom, bingata was undeniably a form of craft production, but it was not folk craft. Produced for elites, bingata was developed by artisans, who brought together multiple fields of knowledge in order to create the alluring patterns so admired by Yanagi and his contemporaries. For the Qing envoy Li Dingyuan, what made the textile remarkable was its intensity of color—which by his account, did not fade. As Li saw it, the “production secret” was the dyeing technique. How this production secret came into existence remains shrouded in mystery. Beginning in the fifteenth century, Ryūkyūan merchants and envoys encountered a range of colorful textiles: blockprinted “chintzes” of Indian origin, wax-resist batiks from Java, yūzen from Kyoto, and the “flower cloth” patterned fabrics from China. Connections to all three regions can be seen in bingata design. Given its similarity to other resist-dyed textiles such as sarasa (dye-patterned cotton) from India and wax-resist batiks from Java, textile scholars have speculated that the technique was transmitted via the trade and tributary routes that connected the Ryūkyū Kingdom to south and southeast Asia. Other scholars credit the Chinese with originating the resist-paste technique used in both bingata and yūzen.7 Although bingata shares much in common with both the stencil-dyeing and freehand paste-resist dyeing of Japan, there is little evidence that ties the innovation to Tokugawa Japan (1603–1868). In this chapter, I survey records of tributary relations between Ming-

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Qing China and the Ryūkyū Kingdom in order to reconstruct the links that point to Ming-Qing China as a source for the development of bingata. More specifically, I argue that the techniques employed in the making of bingata might have derived from Fujian bird-and-flower painting and late Ming printed manuals. Accounts of officials dispatched to Fuzhou by the royal court to acquire technical skills over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries suggest that the tributary trade was a key conduit for the transmission and dissemination of knowledge and technology. In looking at bingata, I seek to illuminate the role of trade and court patronage in the transfer and production of specialized work, and to better understand how the traffic of people and ideas across the East China Sea generated new ways of crafting goods. Paying Tribute, Building an Information Network Located at the intersection of the South China Sea and the East China Sea, the Ryūkyū Islands constituted a critical entrepôt between northeast and southeast Asia. Two routes connected the Ryūkyū court to the coast of China. The eastern route started from Quanzhou (or Fuzhou) and connected the Ryūkyūs, Taiwan, and Sulu. This route carried not only the trade with Southeast Asian tributary states, but also, from the sixteenth century onward, the trade with Spain centered at Manila and later, trade with the Dutch. The western route, starting from Guangzhou, runs along the coast linking major Southeast Asian tributary states, including Siam, Malacca, and Sumatra.8 From 1372 until 1879, the Ryūkyūans, initially as the three principalities of Chūzan, Nanzan (Sannan), and Hokuzan, and then as the unified Ryūkyū Kingdom, maintained a tributary relationship with China. The Ming and Qing courts sent missions to grant investiture to Ryūkyūan kings (cefeng). In 1392, the Ming emperor Hongwu (r. 1368–98) sent “thirty-six families” from Fujian Province to the Ryūkyūs to assist in the maintenance of the tributary trade relations as translators, navigators, and shipbuilders.9 Under the Ming a Maritime Trade Office (shibo si) was established in Fujian to manage the tribute trade, while nontribute trade items were handled by the Guest Residence (huitong guan) for envoys in Beijing and the Ryūkyū House (Liuqiu guan, originally called the Rouyuan yi) in Fuzhou. An estimated 850 Ryūkyūan ships arrived on the Fujian coast, while twenty-three investiture missions were dispatched to the Ryūkyūan court during the five centuries of tributary relations.10

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The Ming shilu (Veritable records of the Ming dynasty), Kyūyō (hereinafter, Chronicle of Ryūkyū), and  Lidai bao’an (Precious documents of successive generations), report that tribute missions from the Ryūkyūs brought local products, as well as goods from the Japanese archipelago and southeast Asia. Local Ryūkyūan products included sulphur, horses, cowry shells, and banana-fiber cloth. Other goods such as products made of gold, silver, copper, and tin as well as agate, ivory, spices, sappan wood, knife sharpeners, and swords came from Siam, Java, Malacca, and Japan.11 The Ming and late Qing courts sent woven silk textiles and raw silk, ceramics, and medicine. Court regalia were also bestowed upon the Ryūkyūan king. The frequency of tribute missions, the scales of tribute presentations, and the quantity and quality of gifts received changed from time to time. The Ryūkyū–Fujian route transported more than envoys and tribute, it also constituted a major network for the circulation of information, skills, and technology. Following the first investiture mission in 1392, Ryūkyū sent sons of officials, royals, and descendants of the “thirty-six families” from Fujian as “official students” (kanshō) to study in the imperial academy (guozi jian) in Nanjing and then, in Beijing. Except for three periods of temporary cessation, the program continued until 1868.12 During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the royal government also dispatched students to Fujian with specific orders to acquire technical skills and training across multiple fields. In 1623, Gima Shinjō (1557–1644), an official who was instrumental in introducing the sweet potato and promoting its cultivation in Ryūkyū, went to Fujian to study sugar cane production techniques.13 Forty years later, in 1663, Taketomi Jūrin went to Fujian to study methods of white sugar processing and lacquering.14 Chronicle of Ryūkyū records several missions dedicated to the acquisition of weaving skills.15 In 1659, the envoy Kuniyoshi traveled as a member of a tributary party to Fujian, where he learned how to weave damask. After he returned home, he developed a new Ryūkyūan technique called uki-ori. Translated as “float weave,” it describes a method of leaving warp or weft threads unbound so that they “float” over areas of the textile, creating a lustrous surface like satin.16 The next recorded mission took place in 1699, when Ōmitake Hyōbu, en route to Beijing on diplomatic matters stopped in Suzhou for a brief period and received instruction in making cotton yarn and silk floss.17 A third mission was ordered in 1736, when the Ryūkyū court sent Ameku Chōka to Fuzhou to learn how to weave plain and complex silks 18 In these accounts, Kuniyoshi, Ōmitake Hyōbu, and Ameku Chōka, like those before them, are described as the key agents

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of transmission: they return to Ryūkyū, introduce the methods to local craftsmen, and then, the Ryūkyūans begin production. Records from Qing envoys, however, suggest that these missions did not lead to an increase in silk production in the archipelago. Xu Baoguang, vice-envoy of the 1719 investiture mission, noted that only the royal court and officials dressed in silk after Ming court fashion, while the rest of the population wore hemp and banana-fiber cloth.19 The 1719 mission carried a total of 4,172 bolts of fine silks and 1,330 jin of raw silk to Ryūkyū, indicating that silk continued to be highly desired by the court.20 In his account of the 1756 mission, Zhou Huang commented that while there were plenty of mulberry trees to be found on Kumejima, the quality of silk was poor and inferior to Chinese silk.21 Nowhere in Zhou Huang’s or Xu Baoguang’s accounts is there mention of bingata. What impressed the Qing envoys were the woven and dyed textiles made from banana-fiber (bashô).22 By the seventeenth century, banana-fiber textiles ranked as one of the kingdom’s most important tributary goods. Zhou observed that the cloth was dyed with five colors and made into garments.23 He had come across nîgashî bashôfu, a polychrome textile made from scouring skeins of banana-fiber yarn by boiling them in an ash solution prior to the dyeing process. The yarns were then dyed in hues of red, yellow, and green before they were woven into cloth to be cut into garments for court elites. Katrien Hendrickx has shown that the appearance of new words for bashôfu listed in Lidai bao’an (Precious documents) during the second half of the seventeenth century hints at the innovation of red and yellow dyes, as well as woven patterns.24 The introduction of woven patterns on bashôfu occurred soon after Kuniyoshi’s mission to Fujian, which suggests that the Ryūkyūan court-ordered mission of 1659 to acquire weaving techniques from China was intended for the development of bashôfu, and not for the expansion of local silk production.25 Additional accounts of similar missions attest to the importance of Ryūkyū kingdom’s tributary relations with the Ming and then, the Qing court for the obtainment of agricultural and handicraft knowledge. The decline of Ryūkyūan overseas trade and its subordination to the Satsuma domain in 1611 may account for the frequency of these missions during the century following.26 Efforts to strengthen local production, including cotton, lacquer, pottery, and sugar, were critical to the kingdom’s economic stability in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.27 The introduction of lacquer, ceramic, and weaving techniques encouraged the flourishing of Ryūkyūan handicrafts during the subsequent centuries.

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As the tributary port of entry, Fujian Province served as the primary pathway through which skills and technology were transmitted across the East China Sea. As the destination for learning, however, Fujian occupied a significant place in the development of Ryūkyūan fields of knowledge. From the arrival of the first group of migrants in 1392 dispatched by the Hongwu emperor, the enduring connection between the Fujian coast and Ryūkyū islands spurred commerce and supported the exchange of thinkers and makers. Bingata, like the dissemination of the sweet potato, sugar cane processing, and the float-weave, was also a product of these exchanges. Although not a direct transplant, the innovation of techniques and particularly design was tied to ways of knowing and crafting that were transmitted via the Fujian coast. The Painter’s Guide to Textile Design Scattered anecdotal sources and archaeological materials have provided conflicting evidence for the origins of bingata. Iha Fuyū (1876–1947), the father of Okinawan studies, argued that the term bingata was a corruption of benigara (red oxide) and Bengal, which he claimed was the source of the technique.28 Kamakura Yoshitarō (1898–1983) later refuted this theory, noting that the Shuri dyers he interviewed in 1926 referred to painting textiles with dyes as bingata.29 More recently, Yonamine Ichiko of the Okinawa Prefectural Museum has proposed that the luxury textile may have developed as a substitute for Chinese or Japanese fabrics.30 I would like to offer a hypothesis on the mysterious origins of bingata by focusing on the transmission of materials and techniques in and out of Fuzhou, which, located on the southeastern edge of the Chinese Empire, was culturally and economically more connected to the other parts of the east and southeast Asian trading world. Fuzhou was home to a flourishing silk industry. The excavation of the late thirteenth-century tomb of Huang Sheng, located in Fuzhou, yielded copious examples of painted and printed textiles—evidence of significant developments in the printing of silk garments. Of the more than three hundred items of clothing and bolts of fabric, there were seventy-nine articles of gold-painted and printed silk gauzes. The decoration of the excavated silks is overwhelmingly floral, with peonies, plum blossoms, chrysanthemums, and lotus flowers forming the majority of the designs. To produce these motifs, the workshop employed three different decorative techniques: (1) painting with gold, (2) relief printing (tuwen yinhua), and (3) stencil

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printing (loukong yinhua). Painting with gold involved mixing gold or silver powder with an adhesive to form a gold paint, this was then applied to a pattern block, which was in turn pressed on to the fabric to produce the design or to provide an outline. Color could then be applied inside the gold outline.31 In relief printing, the raised parts of a prepared printing block are inked before they are stamped onto the textile—this technique was used to make the repeating pattern of a lion playing with a ball. There are only four examples of stencil-printed textiles, including one skirt. For the stencils, wooden boards, or possibly a sheet of thick paper, were used. After the design was cut, the stencil was placed on the textile and a color paste was brushed over the cut areas.32 The final stage involved painting, in which the dyers would use a brush to add flourishes to the motifs. With the innovation of stencil printing as a form of textile decoration in Fujian by the late thirteenth century, printed textiles may have crossed the East China Sea into Ryūkyū during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This connection supports Kamakura Yoshitarō’s theory that the origins of bingata lay in the coastal province. According to Kamakura, the oldest bingata garment dates to the fifteenth century, and he believed it belonged to the daughter or niece of a lord.33 Made from silk, the garment features a pattern of chrysanthemums stencil-painted with cochineal, indigo, and black pigments.34 From the design of chrysanthemums and resist-paste dyeing technique, Kamakura concluded that bingata was transmitted from Fujian sometime during the fifteenth century.35 Kamakura’s theory that the technical process originated in Fujian has received support from Yoshioka Sachio, a fifth-generation master dyer and textile scholar. However, Yoshioka suspects that bin was derived from the name of the ancient Min Empire (present-day Fujian Province) of China.36 Other scholars have insisted that the links to Fujian are speculative at best, since authenticated samples sources date only from the eighteenth century when bingata was already fully developed—and by which time, the archipelago had experienced a century of domination by Satsuma, and Japanese influence had come to supplant that of China.37 The written archive offers few clues to the origins of the bingata, but anecdotal evidence in Chronicle of Ryūkyū suggests that the methods used to create the textiles were obtained during several missions to Fujian. The paper stencil techniques may have been derived from karakami-gata, a patterned paper printed with woodblocks. The karakami, commonly translated as “Tang paper” or “China paper,” is assumed to have been imported into the Japanese archipelago during the early Heian period (794–1185). This process of printing paper was brought into Ryūkyū during the fif-

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teenth year of King Shō Boku’s reign (r. 1752–94), in 1767. After karakami was introduced by Chinen Chikudun Peechin, a court official who was also skilled in making gold-printed paper and damask-patterned paper, the court stopped importing decorative papers.38 The mineral pigments and vegetable dyes used in bingata were predominantly imported from Fujian.39 The Tax Revenue Office controlled and stored imported raw materials such as pigments and silk and cotton textiles and then distributed the materials and stencil designs to kōya (dye shops) supervised by low-ranking officials.40 The court particularly desired cinnabar, one of the key pigments used in bingata and lacquer production. According to Chronicle of Ryūkyū, the kingdom acquired the technique to make the mineral pigment during the early eighteenth century. Yamaguchi Sōki, who was dispatched to Fujian to study painting in 1704, learned the methods for making vermillion dye from cinnabar (Ch. zhu, Jp. shu) during his seven-year residence. Following Yamaguchi’s mission, the court stopped purchasing the dye from Fujian.41 While these records provide circumstantial evidence for bingata’s link to Fujian handicrafts, a nineteenth-century robe in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection evinces a close connection to the southern province (figure 6.1). The garment, cut from a golden yellow crêpe silk tabby and made into a kimono, is believed to have been made for a woman of rank in the Ryūkyūan court. The design is composed of three registers. A pattern of weeping cherry and crane medallions is distributed across the shoulders and upper back, while underneath are hō-ō birds and swallows in flight. At the foot of the robe are streams, wicker baskets, irises, and hollyhocks. The colors found in this piece are typical of the bingata palette and include vermillion red, pink, violet, aqua, and green. Like other surviving eighteenth- and nineteenth- century bingata robes, the design is arranged along an axis of vertical symmetry. Three large linked stencils were likely used to create the continuous pattern on the back of the robe. Motifs composed of birds, butterflies, or insects and interspersed among flowering branches, clusters of flowers, or weeping blossoms are among the most common in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century bingata robes. The combination of birds and floral elements, such as in the design of this piece in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, suggest a connection to bird-andflower paintings. Kamakura maintained that court painters provided the designs for the stencils, which were then delivered to the dyers’ workshop to be converted into stencils.42 Yamaguchi Sōki’s mission in 1704 to study under the Chinese bird-and-flower painter, Sun Yi, and his acquisition of the vermillion dye technique lends credibility to this theory (figure 6.2).

Figure 6.2. “Hydrangea, Blossoming Cherry, and Birds” (1705), Sun Yi (fl. seventeenth/eighteenth centuries). Hanging scroll, ink and color on silk, 46 × 21 in. (116.8 × 53.3 cm). Courtesy of Kaikodo, New York.

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Figure 6.3. “Bird and Flower” (ca. 1715), Yamaguchi Sōki (1672–1743). Ink and color on paper, 26.2 × 48.8 in. (66.6 × 116.3 cm). Courtesy of Yamato Bunkakan, Nara, Japan.

A comparison of the works by Sun Yi and Yamaguchi reveals similarities in composition, color, and brushwork. Swooping birds, peonies in full bloom, rocks, and sharp contrasts in color are distinctive features of both Sun and Yamaguchi (figure 6.3). More striking is the flatness of their compositions. Similar to textile patterning, depth in Yamaguchi’s 1715 painting is achieved by layering the large blossoms on top of and behind the rock formation; the branches extend outward from the central motif and face the viewer, and the bodies of the birds overlap. In the bingata robe, depth is produced in the layered arrangement of streams, irises, and hollyhocks. Bird-and-flower paintings may have been the inspiration for bingata designs, but painting manuals more likely provided the motifs. In her study of the Sun Yi and Yamaguchi, the art historian Huang Liyun has suggested that they may have developed their styles from studying late Ming painting manuals, which may account for the similarities in style and composition.43 Examples of birds, as well as flora and fauna, from the Shizhu zhai shu hua-

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pu (ca. 1619–33) (Ten Bamboo Studio manual of painting and calligraphy), Bazhong huapu (ca. 1621–28) (Eight varieties of painting manual), and Hua sou (1597) (Grove of paintings), do bear a likeness to the works of Sun and Yamaguchi. Painting manuals were instrumental in the circulation of technique and design during the seventeenth century.44 Hu Zhengyan’s (ca. 1582–1672) Shizhu zhai shu huapu, for example, was composed of sixteen volumes and eight albums, including a bamboo album, an orchid album, and an album on birds. Intended for beginners and amateur painters, Hu’s manual separates the components of a painting into discrete elements so that they can be more easily reproduced. In the Shizhu zhai shu huapu, information on the basics of painting—for example, the orchid album opens with an illustration of a hand holding a brush in the correct position—is followed by reproductions of paintings by famous masters. Depictions of the orchid, bamboo, and plum from multiple perspectives precede full compositions. By presenting the subjects of painting in its component parts, the prints serve the same purpose as designs in a pattern book: material to be copied and adapted. James Cahill, in his discussion on the transmission of MingQing paintings styles to Japan, has argued that woodblock-printed books— such as painting manuals—served as a repository of subjects, motifs, and compositions for Japanese artists.45 Historians of Japanese ceramics have further noted how painting manuals provided patterns for decoration.46 The reproductions of model bird-and-flower subjects in late Ming painting manuals constituted an inventory of stock images from which designers of decorative objects could draw. Such evidence, although circumstantial, hints at the possibility that the designers of bingata similarly drew from painting manuals. What made bingata unique, however, were the vivid colors that imbued the designs with a sumptuous quality. After the fabric was stretched, an artisan placed the stencil upon it and then applied the resist paste. This process was repeated until the entire length of the fabric was covered. In the next step, the artisan brushed the fabric with a binding liquid made from ground soybeans to seal the paste. The areas free of paste were then painted using small brushes. Color was layered in increasing intensity. Following the application of the main colors, red, blue, or black ink was used to shade and add definition to the pattern. To hold the pigments in place, the painted areas were covered with an alum solution before the paste was washed away. When the process was completed, the patterns—as the Qing envoy Li Dingyuan described it—“emerge[d] in very brilliant colors.”

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Figure 6.4. Bingata panel with Hō-ō birds and flowers (eighteenth century). Cotton, Okinawa (Ryūkyū Islands). Dimensions: 14¾ × 17¾ in. (37.5 × 45.1 cm). Mrs. Teruyoe Shinohara Gift, 1989. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

The use of shading in bingata, particularly in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury designs, indicates another link to the seventeenth-century painting and print culture in Fuzhou. The use of modulated color, as seen in this

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eighteenth-century bingata panel with hō-ō birds and flowers, evokes the effects of colored ink wash (figure 6.4) For the wings of the birds, the flower petals and leaves, dye was applied by hand to produce graded colors. Creating subtle shades of color was also a decorative technique used in kesi (lit. “carved silk”) weaving and embroidery to add depth to the woven and stitched patterns. The play of light and shade in the design and execution of bingata points to painting again as a key source of inspiration. The innovation of polychrome woodblock printing around the turn of the seventeenth century may have served as another source. With polychrome printing, the subtleties of color could be captured in painting manuals. Color printing also allowed for greater emphasis on surface decoration and texture, giving the images a more graphic quality. The combination of detailed stencil work, edging and shading, and bright pigments distinguished bingata from other forms of textile decoration, and it is also what gave bingata its graphic effect. During the first half of the seventeenth century, the polychrome technique in woodblock printing was developed to produce more nuanced colors on paper. Unlike earlier illustrations printed in solid colors outlined in black ink, the Ten Bamboo Studio Manual was one of the earliest works to be printed in five colors with graded tones. A major innovation of Hu’s manual was the modulation of the intensity of ink and color during the printing process. To achieve this effect, the new technique (douban) involved applying water-based ink in different colors to a set of blocks, which were then used to print on paper in succession. The number of blocks used depended on the variety of colors and tones.47 Hu’s Shizhu zhai shu huapu, and the more popular Jiezi yuan huapu (1679) (Mustard seed garden manual of painting), circulated widely in the centuries following their publication. One of the earliest editions of Hu’s manual was printed in Japan during the mid-eighteenth century.48 A comparison of the color prints in Hu’s manual and the eighteenthcentury bingata panel presents striking parallels. Each picture leaf in Hu’s album is printed in graded tone offset by thick, opaque washes of color, such that they look painted by a brush. In the bingata panel with hō-ō birds and flowers, the variations of light and dark tones accomplishes a similar effect that brings to mind watercolor painting. Shading and edging, in more saturated tones, was also used in the yellow silk robe. In both pictorial color printing and bingata, tonal contrasts and density serve to impart a sense of substance and body to the image. This shared approach to color decoration shows how the circulation of printed and painted material may

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have spurred innovations in design in other media during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These connections, although speculative, highlight how the study, adoption, and adaptation of skills and technologies across multiple mediums produced new approaches to making and crafting. The innovation of bingata further sheds light on how the exchanges between Ming-Qing China and the Ryūkyū Kingdom were not limited to the movement of goods and the performance of tributary relations. Trade and tributary routes constituted critical pathways for intermedia exchange between woven, dyed, printed, and painted goods. In other words, the aesthetic economy was as significant as the literal one of commodities in generating forms of value. Conclusion Over a decade after Li Dingyuan’s mission, a British naval officer, Captain Basil Hall traveled to the Ryūkyū Kingdom. His observations of the islands, Account of a Voyage of Discovery to the West Coast of Corea and the Great Loo-Choo Island in the Japan Sea, first published in 1818, also included several drawings of Ryūkyūans that were developed from “sketches taken on the spot.”49 Like the Qing envoys before him, the dress of the Ryūkyūans greatly interested him. Echoing Zhou Huang and Xu Baoguang, Hall recorded that “by their own account the silks which they wear are Chinese, but the cotton cloths are made on this and the neighbouring islands; the printed patterns of these are not without elegance.”50 Where Hall diverges from the Qing accounts is in his descriptions of dress. He noticed that Ryūkyūan children wore “more shewy dresses than the men.”51 Unlike the attire of men, “The garments worn by the children were often gaudily printed with flowers.”52 Documentation is provided in a drawing of a chief with his two sons, described by Hall as “pretty little boys, with gaudy dresses, and their hair dressed in high shewy top-knots.”53 Yoshioka Sachio has interpreted the drawing as one of the earliest pictorial illustrations of bingata.54 Hall himself only referred to these robes as “gaudy” or “gaudily printed”—providing no clues as to whether or not the children in fact dressed in the “patterned cloth of the eastern seas” of Li’s account. Their “shewy dresses” would have been just as likely to be fashioned from the polychrome banana-fiber textiles so admired by Zhou Huang and Xu Baoguang. Men, according to Hall, avoided patterned robes. Their robes were “generally made of cotton, and of a great variety of colours,” but “the robe of a

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grown up person was never flowered or printed over with figures.”55 The most decorated item worn by men were their sashes (girdle), which were “general richly ornamented with wrought silk and gold flowers.”56 However, earlier in his account, he noted, “The variety of colour and pattern in the dresses of the people to-day, is remarkable. Many wear printed cottons, others have cotton dresses with the pattern drawn on it by hand, instead of being stamped.”57 On women, he had nothing particular to share, as sightings of them were rare. What is striking about Basil Hall’s record of Ryūkyūan dress is how bingata as practice, technique, or type of garment eluded him, as it had escaped the attention of Zhou Huang and Xu Baoguang. Surviving examples from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, would suggest that Hall—like Li before him—must have come across the “patterned cloth of the eastern seas.” Bingata’s scarce appearance in the textual archive is perhaps another instance of the limitation of language to account for craft knowledge. Just as Yanagi found in bingata the expression of an inherent Okinawan folk sensibility in all its natural simplicity, Hall’s impressions of the “gaudily printed” were a result of seeing without looking. In both cases, what made the textile or the garment worthy of notice was its status as a Ryūkyūan (alternatively, an Okinawan) thing. What made bingata a distinctively Ryūkyūan craft was precisely the complex set of skills and materials that the court was able to accumulate over time and acquire from overseas. The development of bingata can only be understood in terms of the plural networks of exchange that enabled the circulation of ideas, technology, and goods. Indeed, bingata’s obscure origins lay as much in the Ryūkyū Kingdom as in the sea routes that linked the islands to the distant coasts of the early modern trading world.

Chapter 7 Mapping the Tracks of Yu Yellow River Statecraft as Science and Technology, 1200–1600 Ruth Mostern

According to François Jullien, the Chinese concept of shi 勢, which Jullien translates as efficacy, is the basis for a practice of evaluating the power that inheres in a phenomenon and transforming that phenomenon in some beneficial way through nonassertive activity. Efficacy-based practice relies on the inherent propensity of a phenomenon in such a way that a desired result takes place in and of itself.1 The epistemology behind efficacy assumes that reality is dynamic, not static, and that motion is governed by the play of factors that are at once opposed and complementary. Jullien invokes the well-known concepts of yin 陰 and yang 陽 to exemplify the idea of dynamically balanced forces, and the concept of dao 道, a keyword of Chinese thought that describes reality through the metaphor of a path or a course. The Chinese scientific tradition does not posit an object of disinterested speculation or a divorce between theory and action. The scientist or engineer seeks instead to understand the nature of dynamic systems in which human activity is itself always implicated in change. The goal is thus to identify a correct course of action in accordance with the propensity of the system. Jullien cites Mencius: “Even with a mattock and a hoe to hand, it is better to wait for the moment of ripening.”2 Within the logic of efficacy, the goal is to wait for a process to unfold and do the right thing at the right time 134

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rather than to rely on a set of tools at the first possible moment of action. The term xing 形 describes the circumstance that scientists, policymakers, or engineers need to understand, while the term shi describes its potential, which humans might harness. Classical treatises often used water images to illustrate the relationship between a circumstance and its potential. A mountain stream is characterized by a downward slope and a narrow channel: this is its circumstance. Because of its resulting strong current, it has the potential to carry boulders downstream: this is its potential. Statecraft and science in the efficacy tradition requires people to achieve a deep understanding of the potential power inherent in any system, and only then to use that information to determine how to proceed. The goal is to allow a desirable effect to come about rather than to take action that is intended to approach a predetermined ideal. This is the epistemology behind Yellow River engineering in middle and late imperial China. In this introduction, I have generally followed François Jullien in translating shi as efficacy, a word with positive connotations in English. His work focuses primarily on military strategy and diplomacy, domains in which potential power was considered to be a good thing. In the remainder of the chapter I will pivot to translating shi more neutrally as power, which is the most common vernacular English translation of the Chinese term. In the context of Yellow River science and engineering, shi was often fearsome. It represented the capacity of the river to unleash vast destructive potential. Thus, good policy and engineering that accorded with the shi tradition often required diffusing the river’s power, and always acknowledged the risk and expense involved in any course of action. I am approaching Yellow River engineering as a matter of world-making as well as science. I take inspiration from Carla Nappi’s book The Monkey and the Inkpot: Natural History and Its Transformations in Early Modern China.3 Nappi explores early modern Chinese knowledge systems through the lens of the well-known seventeenth century author Li Shizhen 李时珍 (1518–93) and his epistemological world. She investigates the form and rhetoric of Li’s monumental Compendium of Materia Medica (Bencao gangmu 本草綱目) for what it reveals about knowledge production and knowledge systems. Essentially Nappi argues that Li was a kind of translator, combining classically Daoist ideas about the transformation of things in constant flux with a paradigmatically Ming empirical approach and a drive to verify and fix things. The Compendium is a heterogeneous work that combines many intellectual strands. Nappi’s work reveals how a world of diverse

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intellectual affordances operated together, even as they all inhered within the early modern Sinophone tradition. This is how I am approaching water engineering. While Li Shizhen was working on his pharmacopeia, early modern Chinese hydrocrats were combining canonical scholarly traditions like the concept of efficacy with empirical observations about the river and its dynamic changes, the imperatives and constraints of statecraft, and local knowledge. Like the Mongol divination experts of Francesca Fiaschetti’s essay in this volume (chapter 9), early modern Chinese hydrocrats were mediators. Under imperial direction, they moved through political and conceptual space, translating abstract ideas and local technique into fiscally and politically efficacious practice.4 While acting within a single linguistic tradition, they performed a world science, transmitting and reinterpreting concepts and techniques about the nature and functioning of the natural world within cosmopolitan networks of scholarly knowledge. Life with the Yellow River necessitated such processes. Hydrocrats, residents, craftspeople, and intellectuals circulated and contested new and revised lore, texts, maps, and diagrams about the river. Waterworks on the Yellow River were a translation zone, a site of struggle over commensurability between worldviews.5 Yellow River waterworks are also something like export textiles circulating through geopolitical and cultural cores and peripheries and moving between technical craft, local knowledge, and literate interlocutors, a story that BuYun Chen relates in this volume (chapter 6). Like Chen, I take technique as a form of early modern science, and the interchange between scholars and locals as a type of translation. Finally, like Nükhet Varlık in this volume (chapter 10), I find world-making processes in the circulation between abstract principles and local ecologies. Yellow River science was geopolitically world-making as well. The river’s medieval and early modern instability resulted from silt being borne downstream, a condition that followed from high rates of erosion precipitated by war and settlement on the Chinese-steppe frontier.6 Moreover, late imperial river management practices took shape while the river was under Jurchen and Mongol control, and the techniques and conventions reached their fullest elaboration under Manchu government. Hydrocrats were members of a multinational and multiethnic community of practice and action. I am referencing translation in one final way besides, which is that this piece brings existing Sinological scholarship about the imperial-era Yellow River into a dialogue with world historians of science, communicating between two academic communities.

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Yellow River Statecraft and Engineering in the Song Dynasty In 1048, following sudden and significant disruption to the grasslands around the middle course of the Yellow River and a rapid increase in the amount of sediment flowing into the river, the Yellow River changed course for the first time in approximately eight hundred years.7 The government, caught off guard, took no action for eight years. Some one million people died or fled Hebei, silt blocked lakes and tributaries throughout the province, and the land became waterlogged and sandy. The whole hydrology of the province changed.8 This event initiated a long period of instability in the river’s course, which only came under control again in the fifteenth century. It was also the beginning of a centuries-long effort by hydrocrats to understand and explain the river’s circumstances (xing) and its potential (shi) in the face of a deteriorating ecology and increasing risk to vulnerable populations, transportation arteries, and state security. In the winter of 1128, Kaifeng governor Du Chong 杜充 (?–1141) intentionally breached the dikes in the river eighty kilometers north of the city in a futile attempt to create a flood that would stop the invading Jin cavalry.9 The military effect was negligible, but the river diversion was catastrophic. Millions of people died or lost their homes and land, and the region never regained its former prosperity.10 The waters flowed south and invaded the Qing River 清江, a tributary of the Yangzi, before reaching the Huai River 淮河, whose lower course the Yellow River captured entirely after the twelfth century and occupied more or less continuously until the nineteenth century. The Huai River, no longer able to reach the sea, backwashed to flood the swamps and lakes of its former course, greatly expanding Hongze Lake 洪澤湖, and unleashing an environmental catastrophe with short- and long-term consequences. Waterworks were reduced to ruin, the floodplain became “desolate,” and Hongze Lake began to expand and to flood frequently. From then onward, the floodplain “suffered a long-term economic decline.”11 The epistemology of efficacy is one way to make Du Chong’s calamitous decision intelligible. During the Northern Song dynasty (960–1126 CE), the rapid accumulation of sediment in the Yellow River was still a new problem, one generated by the degradation of the grasslands because of war and fortification on the frontier between the Song regime and its rivals, the Tangut Xi Xia.12 Breaches in the levees were becoming more and more frequent, but there was as yet no systematic response to them. They

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were simply filled in as they occurred. Labor service in prefectures along the riverbank was mobilized for that purpose as needed, and magistrates and prefects in jurisdictions along the river were impaneled as river levee commissioners on an ad hoc basis and were made responsible for the quality of the work. In 993, Liang Rui 梁睿, serving as inspector of watercourses, created a diversionary canal in Hua zhou 滑州 prefecture. He described the work as an effort to “divide the water’s power” (fen shui shi 分水勢).13 That is to say, the first documented plan for a preemptive and strategic approach to waterworks in this era invoked the language of efficacy epistemology. Because water engineering was still local at this point—engineering and statecraft focused on immediate circumstances even though the river was a large scale hydrological system—all this accomplished was to cause more breaches downstream. This kind of circulation between the local, the regional and the imperial is another sort of translation. The eleventh century opened with debates at court about whether to breach more levees and open more canals, or to maintain and improve the levees to speed up the current and scour the sediment. The debates were carried out with reference to shi theory. Statesmen and engineers also referenced a mythic postdiluvian river system as it existed during the reign of the legendary culture hero Yu the Great 大禹. Yu was said to have built levees, canals, and reservoirs to establish China’s first waterworks in primordial times. By so doing, he created a secure and stable realm of nine provinces with designated tax and tribute levies, and thus set the terms for the first imperial state.14 Yu was the sage-king as engineer whose good works inspired Song dynasty successors. During the Northern Song, facing mounting pressure from a destabilizing river system, the Yu legend influenced policymaking in a material sense, not only in a symbolic way. The ideological and moral dimensions of the legend provided justification for an activist approach to river management, and the spatial and technical parts of the legend were a roadmap for approaches to river engineering.15 Levee technology improved throughout the eleventh century, and the court gradually created a river management bureaucracy at the capital to gather, store, and protect materials, mobilize workers, and develop regional-scale solutions. The first hydraulic engineering treatises date from this time. It should come as no surprise that the first, by one Li Chui 李 垂, presented to the court in 1012 after a season of multiple levee breaches, was a three-chapter illustrated treatise called Daohe xingsheng shu 導河 形勝書.16 The xing in the title is the term that I have been translating as “circumstance.” The title could be translated as “Documents about the

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Circumstances and Advantages of River Guidance.”17 As the title of this lost text implies, it was possible to guide the river in accordance with its circumstances, but not to transform it fundamentally. Li Chui proposed dividing the river into multiple channels that would follow ancient courses, but his plan was rejected as prohibitively expensive and unfeasible. At this time, the guiding principle of politics, river management, and frontier management was anjing 安靜, or stability. The proposition of stability could potentially accord with the epistemology of shi, but as the course of the Yellow River itself became unstable because of the new sediment load from the loess plateau, the principles of stability and efficacy began to collide. And so, as the rate of levee breaches continued to accelerate, the state was forced into active management at a precarious and fractionated time. Statesman Ouyang Xiu 歐陽脩 (1007–72) pointed out in 1055 that people who talked about military strategy, budgets, and engineering schemes without thinking about geography and the immutable facts of hydrology were deluded because they did not consider the natural processes by which the deposition of silt raised the bed of the channel or the way that hydrology determined drainage in terms of the line of maximum slope.18 Likewise, after a 1056 levee-building debacle that resulted in an earthwork that held for only one day, Emperor Shenzong 神宗 (r. 1067–85) demanded that the river improvers go with the flow, literally and figuratively, the shunshui 順水.19 Despite these interventions, military strategy was the discourse that governed the day. The handling of the Yellow River was no longer seen as a response to natural phenomena. The Bureau of Rivers and Canals managed river statecraft and engineering under the aegis of the Finance Commission, and local circumstances were sidelined in favor of large-scale solutions.20 The river was not managed in terms of its own circumstances, but in terms of the wider fiscal and strategic context. Shi was a military and diplomatic keyword as well as a water management term, after all. Yellow River Engineering before and during the Ming Era In 1115, the Jurchens, who lived in the Manchurian plains and woodlands to China’s northeast, established a new Chinese-style regime that they called the Jin 金 dynasty, and in 1128 they invaded north China and took control. In 1177, the Yellow River broke into two branches.21 One branch flowed south of the Shandong Peninsula 山東, capturing the course of the

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Southern Qing River 南清江, which was also the former course of the Si River 泗水, and flowed from there into the Huai River. The other branch flowed north of the peninsula into the course of the Northern Qing River 北清江. The full northern course was restored promptly, but in 1178, it broke out again, and was not brought under control for decades. In 1193, regional commandant Wang Rujia 王汝嘉 observed that in the past, the Yellow River had branches and debouchments off its southern bank, and he proposed channeling it into these historic courses, noting that “if it were possible to lead it off in such a way that it spread out, this would be enough to drain away the power [shi] of the river.” 22 In this context, shi is clearly a bad thing. The river has too much power, and the goal of human activity is to reduce and so to diminish its harmful force. Subsequent debates during the Jin dynasty focused on subdividing the river in a way that would minimize heavy expenses on hydraulic works, and determining locations for breaching the river’s dikes to create the new courses in places that would minimize damage to cities and farmlands that lay in the way of planned new routes. The principle that governed these discussions was known as fen sha qi shi 分殺其勢: “Divide [the river] to extinguish its power.”23 The river changed course again in 1391, with two major branches primarily capturing the course of the Huai River. Between 1416 and 1448, the dominant southern course took the bed of the Guo River, except that between 1448 and 1455 there was a substantial northern course that took the Northern Qing, which was eventually closed off. After the floods of the late 1480s and 1490s, up to 70 percent of the water went north again.24 These dire centuries of accelerating silt deposition, vast expenditures, and endless human suffering also interfered with the south to north transportation of grain, and by extension the integrity of the empire itself. Inspection reports and policy proposals routinely discussed the worsening circumstances using the language of xing and shi. For instance, an inspection report by Chen Zheng 陳政 in 1492 reported that “today its old course has silted up and become shallow, so that it has gradually shifted north, joining with the Qin River 汶水 [in northern Zhili], its situation becoming more and more unmanageable.”25 At this point, policymakers began to contemplate giving up management of the flood plain altogether because so much sediment was accumulating that they could not figure out how to transport it from the river channels to the sea. In 1493, Liu Daxia 劉大夏 (1436–1516) supervised the construction of dikes that would assure an exclusive southern route, but this simply transported the sediment to the river mouth, where it formed mounds that kept the river from draining

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out to the sea. This caused floods upstream, blocked the Grand Canal, and disrupted the grain transport. The system came to require an ever more extensive network of dikes, revetments, locks, spillways, and drainage canals. Increasingly complex, it also generated a myriad of interlocking problems. In addition to hydrocrats making plans at court and regional officials organizing projects around Qingkou and throughout the plain, Yellow River engineering required the translation of policy, practice, and empirical observation to and among local managers and artisans with a wide range of specialized technical skills and a huge labor force.26 During the first three-quarters of the sixteenth century, the Yellow River took a multiplicity of paths across the Huai floodplain, often simultaneously, as many as sixteen different streams.27 A 1558 report identified the problem as a matter of shi, explaining that the power of the river was weak, as it was distributed among so many streams, causing sediment to settle in riverbeds and river mouths rather than being pushed out to sea.28 A 1577 proposal recommended forcing the Yellow River into a narrow channel, shared with the Huai River, to use the water from the Huai and the altitude gradient with Hongze Lake to scour out the sediment and push it out to sea.29 The court tasked Pan Jixun 潘季驯 (1511–95), a riparian works specialist, with putting this plan into action in 1578–79, essentially reconstructing the entire lower course of the river. Pan’s achievements on the river belong in part to his skill as someone who could translate ideas across centuries and social classes and into action. He traveled around the floodplain talking to river denizens and artisans, and he read widely in the history and methods of hydrology. His system drew from a range of methods found in books and local projects.30 The numbers are staggering. Pan’s project built roughly 1.2 million feet of earthen embankment and 30,000 feet of stone embankment, stopped 139 breaches, constructed 4 stone spillways of 300 feet each, dredged 115,000 feet of riverbed, planted 830,000 willow trees to stabilize the tops of the dikes, and drove in a large but unrecorded number of tree trunks as piling under the embankments. The effort cost 500,000 ounces of silver and nearly 127,000 piculs of rice. The laborers and engineers under Pan’s direction unified the channel and established two tiers of dikes: so-called thread dikes close to the banks to speed up the current and setback dikes two or three li 里 (up to a mile) away from the riverbed to protect against flooding.31 Pan Jixun’s efforts also created a negative feedback mechanism. Water depth and velocity increased as he anticipated. However, as more sediment

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washed out to sea, the rate of delta accretion increased from an average of 33 meters per year to 1,540 meters per year until 1592. At that point, levee maintenance relaxed somewhat, and the rate of delta expansion became somewhat lower, though still much higher than it had been before.32 The river mouth became so long and gentle that backwash ultimately deposited more sediment in the river than had been the case before and reduced its carrying capacity. In the long run, the sixteenth century levees set the stage for the catastrophic 1855 course change.33 The Pan Jixun system also included a new dam at Qingkou 清口, on the Huai River near its confluence with the Yellow River, from which water could be released periodically to scour the Yellow River bed.34 Lake Hongze, which had emerged as an unintended consequence of human water management, ultimately became the fourth largest lake in China. Yellow River sediment washed into the lake every time there was a flood. As the lakebed level rose, the adjoining levees were raised higher and higher as well. Pan Jixun and his successors exploited this dynamic by raising the levee even higher, increasing the size of the lake yet further, and forcing the Huai River to enter the Yellow at the confluence between the Huai River, the Yellow River, and the Grand Canal, instead of at its former ingress. As the lakebed rose, the Huai gradient decreased by 38 percent. The groundwater level around the Huai rose, and its ability to discharge floods declined. Floods and waterlogging on the Huai became more frequent, and the land around the river subsided, drowning cities and farms. The dam collapsed in 1851, and the Yellow River levee system breached catastrophically four years later.35 Some of the commentary from this era helps to explain how Pan’s strategy was governed by shi theory, which linked Pan’s technique with four hundred years of Yellow River observation and a tradition of interaction with the natural world that stretched almost two millennia. The first reads as follows: When waters are divided, their shi is weakened, and when their shi is weakened, sediments come to a standstill. . . . [But] when waters join, their shi is fierce, and when their shi is fierce, the sediments are scoured away. When the sediments are scoured away, the river becomes deep. . . . One builds dikes to confine the water and one uses the water to attack the sediments. If the water does not precipitously overflow the two banks, then it must scour in a straight line along the bottom of the river. There is here a fixed pattern/principle li, and a shi that is inexorable.36

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Another, from the Ming History reads: “Although human power is incapable of dredging it, the shi of the water itself can scour it away by impact. . . . The Yellow River cannot be led by human power. If we keep the dike defenses in good repair, on the other hand . . . then the water will pass through the midst of the land and the sediment will be removed by being entrained in the water.”37 Shi theory assisted Ming statesmen and engineers to understand and articulate principles of hydrology, but it did not solve the problem of sediment accumulation. Delta accretion became very rapid. The Yellow River backwashed up the channel of the Huai River as sediment accumulated at the river mouth, and in 1595–96, Yang Yikui 楊一葵 supervised the redivision of the waters once again “to repress the power of the river.”38 Delta accretion slowed down as officials and engineers monitored the current of the river between the dikes in an ongoing way. The situation held with relative stability until the river changed course in 1855, though it required ever-increasing management and investment and tolerance for frequent floods—but that is a subject for a different essay. Yellow River Science Retranslated Political and Geophysical Worlds Yellow River science was an act of translation across and between worlds. Hydrocrats communicated with each other and with river denizens across space and over generations, mediated between abstract and concrete knowledge, and did so embedded in a welter of constituencies with different interests in the river; and they used the mediums of policy discussion and classical exegesis, and engagement with the dynamic and engineered geophysical world itself as well. This is a world historical story in another sense as well, which is that river engineering was itself a world-making task. The engineered Yellow River, connected to the Grand Canal, tied the maritime-facing world of the southern Chinese coast together with the North China floodplain and the steppe-facing Central Asian world upstream. By doing so, it reconfigured and retranslated complex interactions in natural and human systems throughout East Asia. Once the river was effectively fixed between levees in the sixteenth century, catastrophic course changes came to an end, but smaller-scale flooding continued to increase, and the livelihood of residents around the river course continued to decline. The “distinctive political economy of water” in late imperial China required wealthy areas of the Yangtze valley

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to subsidize the north and other ecologically fragile zones throughout the Ming and most of the Qing.39 Pan Jixun’s levee-building project fixed the river in place, and small farmers along with it. Smallholder lives around the river were precarious, but the state was determined to maintain the floodplain as an agricultural zone. The government “actively propped up” the Yellow River floodplain. As Kenneth Pomeranz puts it, “This economic vision created a particular idea of environmental management in which the central task within China proper was the reproduction of the material basis of modest agrarian prosperity in ever-more precarious ecological conditions, as Chinese settlers moved up hillsides, pressed closer to riverbanks, lowered water tables, and moved onto marginal lands.”40 The levees ultimately extended over 1,400 kilometers. They required diligent maintenance, and they had to be rebuilt after each devastating breach or flood.41 Enclosed between levees, the riverbed rose as its course aged, and it flowed as much as 40 feet above ground on some occasions.42 As the river rose above the surface of the plain and tributaries were extinguished or reversed their flow, the floodplain was bisected into two separate river systems, a Hai River 海河 system in the north, and a Huai River system in the south. Rather than serving as a destination for tributaries, as it would have been in a less engineered system, the Yellow River became a source of tributaries, with seepage from its levees running off into the Huai and Hai watersheds.43 The high beds of Yellow River paleocourses persist today as microlandforms, small hills that remain higher than the surrounding land. Historically, the high ground of the paleocourses prevented the river from returning to any of its former courses after a major flood. At times, the river was confined between high levees that were spaced one to three kilometers apart, accelerated erosion, and were riskier in the case of high water flows. At other times, it flowed between low, wider-spaced levees five to ten kilometers apart that accommodated bigger floods but caused more silt to accumulate, took fertile land out of production, and encouraged farmers to risk moving into the land between them. As we have seen, neither option was ideal, and water managers regularly shifted between the two options. As late as the Tang era, the floodplain still had numerous lakes and swamps that contributed to flood divergence, sand discharge, and flux adjustment. The flood-prone and silt-bearing character of the river from the Song dynasty onward, combined with the agricultural intensification of the middle and later imperial era, destroyed most of the remainder of them. Floodplain hydrology deteriorated. By the mid-sixteenth century, all remaining tributaries had silted up and dried out, and it became in-

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creasingly difficult to maintain the Grand Canal as well. The soil became waterlogged and saline. As historian Gong Li and his colleagues put it: “In ancient times, the Huang-Huai-Hai Plain was a network of rivers and lakes. But after the repeated flooding, scouring, and silting of the Yellow River, many rivers became more shallow and even dried up completely; lakes became marshlands and were gradually reclaimed into farmlands. This caused the climate of that region to become more dry and water shortages to occur; and the silt raised the water level of the plain: wells had to be dug deeper and deeper.”44 Gong Li and his coauthors allude to the fact that large-scale state-sponsored flood control on the floodplain shifted the cost of water for agriculture onto poor farmers. Without tributaries and robust wetlands, there could be no canals, either for irrigation or transportation, and in any event, since 70 percent of annual rainfall occurs during the monsoon months of July and August, little rainfall or surface water is available during the spring growing season. Instead, farmers on the North China plain became responsible for digging thousands of small wells.45 They too were vernacular hydrologists and civil engineers. They had intimate knowledge of local conditions, even if they were not able to translate their understanding into influence on policy or large-scale action. The floodplain, especially around the Huai River, never recovered its former prosperity after the Northern Song. By the twentieth century, the soil was deficient in nitrogen and phosphate.46 Settlement was sparse because of the high flood risk, transportation was difficult, and commercialization, investment, and infrastructure development were limited.47 To this day, historical microhighlands and flood splay fans still feature low groundwater and sandy soil with coarse particles. The region even includes sand dunes developed by wind action. The depressions behind historical levees and the depressions left by paleochannels are characterized by high water tables, fine silty clay, high salt content, and sometimes even salty marshes in the middle of depressions.48 These depressions, with serious salinization and waterlogging, each occupy a length of 600–700 kilometers and a width of 5–10 kilometers, or a total of approximately 0.7 million hectares. They remain well-known low-yield areas today. Catastrophe coexisted with the routine decline of fertility in this heavily engineered landscape. On the poorly drained eastern half of the Hebei plain and all the northwest Shandong plain, waterlogging, especially during the heavy rains of July and August, became a problem. The lowest-lying areas, former wetlands and lakebeds, became marshes and breeding grounds

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for locusts, and the soil became more saline. By the late imperial era, this land was the last to be farmed, the least productive, and the first to be abandoned.49 The region became “the heart of China’s so-called flood and famine region.”50 Total arable land fell between 1740 and 1930.51 As the field of science studies reveals in case after case, science is not just about the practice of scientists. It is also about how abstract concepts concerning the natural world impact landscapes and societies. Science changes the real world in ways that are not unidirectional, not necessarily for the public good, and not always for the better. Like the Canal du Midi in seventeenth-century France, the engineered Yellow River was a collective accomplishment of named hydrocrats and unheralded locals and artisans.52 Yellow River engineering that empowered the state through the technical conquest of nature, and locked it in to particular solutions besides. Conclusion The other river chapter in this volume (chapter 3) is Rila Mukherjee’s essay about European maps of the Ganges River, which is a member of the same Himalayan family as the Yellow. As in the story I have related here, Mukherjee emphasizes that the history of Ganges cartography reflected success in technical achievement, but not a simple history of progress. Map quality often improved even when the information conveyed in them poorly reflected geophysical conditions. Likewise, between the twelfth and the seventeenth centuries, Yellow River waterworks became larger and more sophisticated, and the textual and political apparatus around them expanded dramatically. However, the quality of life of riverside denizens did not improve, and the cost of attending to the river put an increasing strain on the imperial budget. And as with Mukherjee’s subjects, who stretched Ptolemy to the breaking point to maintain a link to classical-era science, so too did Yellow River hydrocrats reference the Tribute of Yu and the efficacy tradition. My case parallels Mukherjee’s in one more way as well, which is that hydrocrats and artisans interpreted and created a world even as the channel of the river itself shifted at the same time. Scientists were not just talking to each other, but to a natural world with its own kind of agency, and this too is a process of translation.

Part III Advancing Health and Welfare

Chapter 8 Animal Remedies in Space and Time The Case of the Nail of the Great Beast Irina Podgorny

Late in the eighteenth century, the Welsh traveler, naturalist and antiquarian Thomas Pennant (1726–98) devoted a long description in his Arctic Zoology to the elk (Alces alces), called the moose in North America, the largest extant species in the deer family (figure 8.1). According to Pennant, North American natives used the elk hoof in the same way it was used in Old World pharmacopeias: “The opinion of this animal’s being subject to epilepsy seems to have been universal, as well as the cure it finds by scratching its ear with the hind hoof till it draws blood. That hoof has been used on Indian medicine for the falling-sickness; they apply it to the heart of the afflicted, make him hold it in his left hand, and rub his ear with it.”1 On the other side of the Americas and almost at the same time, the Spanish military engineer and naturalist Félix de Azara (1746–1821), attributed the same property to the hooves of the Paraguayan tapir (Tapirus terrestris), a large herbivorous mammal ungulate, with a short, prehensile snout, that inhabits jungle and forest regions of South America, called mborebi by the Guaranese people, gran bestia (great beast) by the Spaniards, and anta by the Portuguese (figure 8.2). Azara remarked, “To the nails of their toes ground down and taken in powder, is attributed the power of curing epilepsy.”2 Azara, apparently, did not observe or register this kind of practice; he was just quoting others’ observations, in particular the notice 149

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Figure 8.1. Moose Deer. Source: Thomas Pennant, Arctic Zoology, vol. 1: Quadrupeds (London: Henry Hughs, 1784).

that originated in the seventeenth-century chronicle on Paraguay written by the Jesuit priest Antonio Ruiz (1585–1652), who, according to Juan Ignacio de Armas, was the first to attribute antiepileptic virtues to the tapir.3 So Azara was neither the first nor the only one: beginning in the seventeenth century, every time the tapir was described in no matter which region of the South American lowlands, the medical virtues of its hoof reappeared over and over again. For example, in 1731 the Jesuit priest José Gumilla (1686–1750) had reported on its medical use in the Orinoco missions.4 Still in the nineteenth century, on the upper Essequibo in Guyana, the hoofs of a tapir were used as charms for snakebites, ray-fish stings, and fits of all kinds. Creole residents used gran bestia in Georgetown and Ecuador.5

Figure 8.2. The Tapir. Source: Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, Histoire naturelle générale et particuliére, avec la description du cabinet du roi, vol. 11, plate 43 (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1749–1804).

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Thus, referring either to the moose, elks or tapirs, to the Old or the New World, the Southern or the Northern hemispheres, the sources exhibit the recurring belief that the hooves of large mammals all called “the great beast” were valuable in treatment of human epilepsy.6 Pennant considered this association a kind of universal belief or a remarkable parallel to the Old World, a process in which underlying ancestral unity of humans causes them to react similarly to new and evolving situations even though they are out of touch with other groups.7 However, the various spatial and temporal frameworks in which these large animals appeared in connection with epilepsy pose a very interesting problem for global history and, in particular, for the circulation of animal-based remedies in the age of sail. The transfer of names, virtues, and objects happened more than once and involved regions far beyond the Americas. As a result, this chapter presents a preliminary survey by which to track, in the longue durée, the path of a remedy that appeared in therapeutics on both sides of the Atlantic. Mentioned in the natural histories, books of remedies, and charitable handbooks that proliferated in the Old World and European settlements from the seventeenth century onward, the gran bestia is a good case from which to investigate how the transfer of a name between continents involved the transfer of medical virtues and properties of the materials implicated. This example illustrates how commerce in medicines, skins, and other animal products contributed to associating—long before Linnaeus—different kinds of animals from different cultural worlds. Far from processes that can be called “parallels,” far from “universals,” we suggest that the history of this association reveals world-historical processes of connection. By tackling the emergence of a natural product, this chapter not only raises questions about the practical dynamics and the labeling of knowledge but also provides an experiment from which one can learn how knowledge of the natural world was shaped by exchanges of all kinds, in particular, translation. Which Animal Is the “Great Beast”? Sixteenth-century Europeans were confronted with elements of new fauna, entirely different from that known in Europe and ancient times.8 This sharp zoographic separation, however, did not prevent them from analogizing Old World and New World kinds. Through a process that involved comparison, analogy, and translation, the fauna and flora of the Americas were incorporated into a novel ordering of knowledge where, as Foucault said, signs and names were also part of things.9 In this constellation, large

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animals from different regions of the globe were subsumed under the name of the “great beast,” a category that included the elk/moose, the tapir, and the antelope, and represented the source of a remedy for epilepsy. Also known as the “falling sickness,” epilepsy, characterized by sudden convulsion and seizures, was one of the world’s most intriguing maladies. Historians consider it a disease that for thousand of years “had received more attention than any other individual ailment.”10 The nature of epilepsy, often seen as mystical, combined naturalistic (symptom of a brain disorder) and spiritual (possession, an effect of the devil or the divine, mystical power) causes and so did its treatment (personal care, ancient pharmaceutical therapies, magic). In the Hippocratic tradition, the cause of epilepsy was humoral, an excess of phlegm that rushed into the blood vessels of the brain and filled the ventricles, creating pressure, which was released via a seizure. Epilepsy was cold and moist and its treatment required hot and dry substances. In the seventeenth century, when the virtues of the great beast propagated over the continents, iatrochemistry proposed that epilepsy was caused by chemical forces, such as acid vapors irritating the animal spirits contained in the spinal cord and in the brain, that could be counterbalanced by the application of basic salts. Many animal and vegetable substances were reputed as antiepileptic remedies. Already in the eighteenth century many were condemned as useless, although still in use. Among the chief of them were earthworms, powdered human skull, scrapings of human vertebrae, human brain, unicorn horn, burned ivory, and the foot of an elk.11 These substances were mentioned in books and found in every early modern cabinet of curiosities and in druggists’ booths, such as Jan van der Mere museum of Delft and the shops of Lewes and Saxony’s apothecaries.12 Animals were indeed a world of remedies, of commodities and advantages for humans. In the kind of medicine championed by alchemists, it was believed that God had given natural objects the keys to the mysteries of disease in a system of symbols or signatures. By a certain physical quality a plant, a mineral, or an animal revealed an affinity with a certain star, organ, or disease. There was a mutual analogic sympathy and harmonious concordance of natural objects with the members of the human body. It was the physician’s function to trace the resemblances between symptoms of disease on the one hand and the matching virtues of natural objects on the other, for such resemblances were the signatures—the signs and symbols provided by nature— to guide the search for health. Understanding the signatures enabled the individual to give the right name to things, as

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a way of regaining an Adamic language of nature. Affixing an appropriate name to a certain creature was a crucial part of natural history, which is why lexicography, exegesis of ancient texts, and philology became central to the study of nature and physics.13 Nature, however, was far from being pristine. Furthermore, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was critical to reconcile the tensions between classical, medieval Christian, and rabbinic scholarship, and the zoologies reaching the Old World in the wake of new geographical discoveries. Ambiguity, synonymy, and obscurity conspired against rationalizing an understanding of the properties of materials expressed in different languages and issuing from different traditions. This was particularly true in the case of the animal that in Spain, Portugal, and Italy was called the gran bestia (“great beast,” in Latin, animal magnum or magna bestia). For naturalists and physicians alike, the main question regarding this animal was how many and what names it had, that is, what the real identity of this beast was. The great beast, far from being quoted in ancient pharmacopeias or natural histories, first appeared late in the sixteenth century, when, early in the 1580s, the Milanese physician Apollonius Menabenus (exact dates unknown), former protomedico of John III Vasa of Sweden, published a treatise in Latin to discuss the actual anatomy and virtues of the elk, an animal that deserved the name of magnum animal or “great beast.” Few naturalists and physicians from Southern Europe in early modern times had seen the elk, mentioned by Caesar in De bello Gallico, with their own eyes.14 Abundant in Scandinavia, the Baltic regions, Prussia, and Russia, it was one of “the wonders of the North,” those marginal lands only vaguely known to the sixteenth-century learned Italian world.15 The appellation “elk” was, as Menabenus discussed, of ambiguous meaning and, moreover, there were innumerable names for designating what today is considered to be a single kind. This prolific nomenclature was so extreme that in 1887, when Wilhelm Blasius, a professor of zoology at Braunschweig, published a monograph on this animal, its first nine pages were dedicated to the many names that had been used to designate the elk since Caesar´s time. Blasius remarked that the Swedish naturalist Olaus Magnus (1490–1557), one of the most important early modern authorities on this animal, in his History of the Northern Peoples (Rome, 1555) named the elk as a wild ass or onager, an analogy that could explain the transfer to the elk of the virtues that Dioscorides and Pliny attributed to the ass in the treatment for epilepsy: “The ashes of the (ass’) hoof helpeth the falling evil.”16

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Nigrisoli Wärnhjelm remarked that the facts narrated by Magnus could have stimulated Menabenus to write about this animal that in Sweden had been placed under the king’s protection and was considered royal game.17 Aware of the potential commercial interest in Swedish “exotic” and “curious” natural objects, Menabenus promoted the medical use of the hoof, as previously described by Conrad Gessner (1551).18 Another reason was that, according to some authorities, this creature was itself subject to epilepsy, but cured itself by putting the hoof of its left hind foot into its ear: For every day throughout the year it hath the Falling-sickness, and continueth in the pangs thereof untill the hoof of his right fore-foot touch his left ear, which comes not to pass but by the extream torments of the body, for whilest the member are reached and stretched with many strains and Convulsions (as it falleth out in that sickness) by chance the aforesaid foot rubbeth the said ear, and immediately thereupon the Beast is delivered from his pangs: whereby we are to admire the works of our creator, which having laid so heavy an infirmity upon this poor Beast, wherewith he is dayly tormented, yet hath he also provided a remedy for that evil in the hoof of his own foot, making the torments of the disease to be the Apothecary for applying the remedy to the place of cure.19

Referring to his own firsthand experience in Sweden, Menabenus published his Treatise on the Great Beast first in Latin in Milan and Cologne (1580, 1581). A few years later, it was translated into Italian (1584) and started being extensively quoted by other Italian physicians and naturalists, such as Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605) and Andrea Bacci (1524–1600). In particular Bacci’s Discorso della gran bestia detta alce da gli antichi, translated into Latin (1598) and Spanish (1678), popularized the name and the virtues of the great beast, whose nails and “bones,” as mentioned before, started being exhibited or stored in the most important Italian cabinets of curiosities.20 In 1600, Bacci’s Italian version from 1587 was exported to New Spain together with Andrés Laguna’s translation of Dioscorides’s De Materia Medica, and several books on Paracelsian and Galenic medicine and pharmacopeia.21 As a result of the trade in books and the commerce they activated, the “great beast” success expanded far beyond the Scandinavian countries. Thus, by the seventeenth century the category of gran bestia subsumed at least seven to eight animals: to the elk were added what today are known as the African oryx, the Irish deer, and three American animal kinds—the

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tapir, the moose, and the wapiti.22 One can say that long before the creation of the Linnaean system, in the context of an epistemology of resemblance, names such as “gran bestia” connected animal kinds from different regions on the basis of common properties, such as strength and size, the presence of hooves, the vast magnitude of the horns, or their use in crafts and arts. The Local Names of the Global Great Beast In the seventeenth century, Jesuit missionaries started reporting the presence of the great beast on both sides of the Atlantic. Thus the great beast appeared as part of the natural history of New France. In those descriptions, the Jesuit priests said that the hoof of the left foot of the moose, called the “great beast” by the natives, was used to cure epilepsy. In the seventeenth century, the left foot of the moose was reported as part of the local pharmacopeia of the Abnaki.23 A century later, when the Jesuit order was expelled from Spain and the Americas in 1767, nails of the great beast were recorded in apothecary shops throughout the continent, including the Jesuit Botica from Santiago de Chile.24 In Africa, on the other hand, the names of the great beast and alce were used in the seventeenth century for the Congo animals that the Portuguese called macoco and the locals, ncocco or néollo. According to the Capuchin Italian missionaries to East Africa, the nails of the right foot of these beasts had peculiar virtues.25 Sources seem to indicate that the proliferation of this kind of analogy happened during the seventeenth century, a hypothesis that, however, still needs further research. What we have in that century is a burgeoning interest in this beast and the propagation of its virtues in the literature and the commerce of drugs in a geographical span that included the Americas, Europe, and East Africa. In Spanish America, the name gran bestia was affixed to the most impressive mammal from the region, namely what today is known as tapir, a name taken from the Tupi, the lingua franca used in the Portuguese domains, and expanded to European languages as the general name for the kind.26 Today this name includes five extant species, including one from Malaya. Whereas the name “tapir” was first used in the second half of the sixteenth century, the Spaniards had seen and mentioned this animal before, comparing it not with the elk but with cows, tigers, and asses; in such analogies it was called vaca, vaca montés, tigre tanta, vaca danta, sachavaca, vaca mocha, and anteburro.27 Apparently, it was first seen by Spanish navigators Martín Fernández de Enciso (ca. 1470–1528), Alonso de Ojeda

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(ca. 1468–1515), and Diego de Nicuesa on their expedition to the Isthmus of Darien in 1509. Still in 1514, Peter Martyr (1457–1526) future Chronicler of the Council of the Indies, described the new animal, which had no name but seemed a composite of a series of Old World mammals: “But there is especially one beast engendered here, in which nature hath endevoured to shewe her cunnyng. This beaste is as bygge as an oxe, armed with a long snoute lyke an Elephant, and yet no Elephant. Of the colour of an oxe and yet noo oxe. With the house of a horse, and yet noo horse. With eares also much lyke unto an Elephant, but no soo open nor soo much hangying downe, yet much wyder then the eares of any other beaste.”28 Enciso in his Suma de Geografía (1519) named the animal vaca mocha (behorned cow), a name that according to Armas, was later adopted by other Spanish authorities.29 In 1526, the Spanish explorer of North America Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón (ca. 1475–1526) first observed the American moose or elk calling it “danta.” In the same year, Fernández de Oviedo in his Natural History of the Indies (1526) recorded what seems to be the first transfer of an Old World name to the “tapir.” Oviedo remarked that the Spaniards from Tierra Firme or Mainland Province (the southern portion of the Spanish coastal possession surrounding the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico) had been calling “danta” an animal that the natives called “beori,” for the quality of their hides. “But they are not dantas,” Oviedo underlined. That appellation coexisted with the native names, such as vagra (Peru), beori (New Spain), maipouri (Guiana), and the Guaranese mborebi. Thus, as early as the 1520s, the Spaniards and Portuguese started calling two animals from the Americas—the moose from North America and the tropical tapir—anta, adanta, and danta, which were the Spanish and Portuguese names for the Old World elk but also the result of the late medieval transfer of words and properties of animals from Africa to other animals from northern Europe: “Anta” and the several versions of this word came, according to some authors, from the Arab “lamt” or “lamta,” which denoted the oryxes of the Sahara, a kind of “antelope.” Arab geographers in the Middle Ages referred to the large Berber tribe of the Lamta, who were particularly famous for the light and solid shields they made of an animal of that name and that in those times were offered to the kings of the Mahgreb and al-Andalus.30 Transmutation of names was in fact a very complex phenomenon. The connection between the tapir, the elk, and the oryx through a common name thus seems to derive not from an early association with epilepsy but from the value attributed to their hides. Before becoming a source of medicinal nails, elks had been highly

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valued because of their skins, to such an extent that elk hides were used for payment or required as a tribute or war indemnity. The Russians obtained them from the Siberian Khanty and Nentsy peoples, trading in hides with China.31 In the seventeenth century elk was one of the most popular hides in Muscovy, priced at around two rubles each. Depending on the quality, they were sold abroad at two rubles in Brabant and between three and four rubles in Spain.32 Considerable stocks of elk skins from Siberia and the Yug River region were transported through the Dvina to Arkhangelsk for local trading purposes. In the 1670s, the market at Arkhangelsk received around five thousand Siberian hides annually, which were then shipped to Moscow and Livonia while those in excess of domestic requirements were exported. In 1671 Arkhangelsk imported forty-two tanned elk hides from abroad.33 The trade in elk skins from Russia and Livonia was in part managed by the Dutch, who transported the skins to Spain and Portugal, where “anta”—as mentioned before—became the general name for the elk, the buffalo, and all animals “which had an armor,” namely, animals whose skins, reputed for their quality, were used for crafting shields, armor, breeches, and jackets for soldiers.34 Many sources referred to this craft: Topsell mentioned that elk skins were dressed by tawers with the fat of fishes and alum to make breastplates and to create shelter from the rain.35 Oil-tanned elk skin was highly priced for clothing since it was considered bulletproof, as were the skins of rhinoceros, the African ncocco, and the American tapir. Thus, Friedrich Schiller in Wallenstein Camp, set in the first half of the seventeenth century, mentions this property attributed to shields made of elk skins in the description of Wallenstein’s attire: “He wears a jerkin of elk-skin tough, Through which no bullet may find its way.” Not surprisingly, Félix de Azara was still attributing this property to the Paraguayan tapir as late as the late eighteenth century, emphasizing that “the gun never succeeds in killing them.”36 So, the elk/anta—in all its forms—combined two properties expressed in two objects of trade in different historical moments: the first product was a gun-proof skin, suitable for shields and armor. Late in the sixteenth century, following the success of the advertisement of Menabenus and Bacci of the medical virtues of the animal now called “great beast,” the hoof of the elk, a by-product of the industry of the elk hides, became credited as a cure for and a charm against epilepsy. The nail thus became an object of trade. The promotion of the virtues of the elk was such a success that Lithuania became the seat of an industry in healing tokens. The hoof of the elk was employed and its trade extended

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b Figure 8.3. (a) German Wooden drug jar for Ungula Alcis, seventeenth century. Courtesy The National Museum of American History, Collection Bristol-Myers Squibb European Apothecary). (b) Jar for Ungula Alcis. Courtesy: Pharmaziemuseum Brixen; Photographer: Oswald Peer.

a

as far as Italy and Spain.37 Therefore, Baltic turners specialized in elk bones, antlers, and horns.38 Rings were made from the keratin of the hoof, and worn on the ring finger of the left hand, or pieces of the hoof were set in rings of gold and worn so that the curative medium would be in contact with the skin.39 Whereas horns and antlers in early modern Russia were trivial as economic factors and the really significant sector in connection to animals was the trade in hides, the trade in elk hooves was very active in the seventeenth century. Apothecaries and mountebanks from all over Europe sold and traded in its different forms, either as talismans or chemical products. In 1709 Paris offered Pied d’Élan and Ongle d’Élan; German apothecaries from the second half of the seventeenth century offered “Elchsklauen” either as a powder, a preparation, or in calcined or untreated form.40 Thus,

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Figure 8.4. Elchklaue, as was sold in the seventeenth century. The foot of the elk had to be displayed in order to prove that the hoof on sale belonged to that animal and was not obtained from any other animal. Courtesy: Pharmaziemuseum Brixen; Photographer: Oswald Peer.

in 1663, the German alchemist Johann Joachim Becher described the three different forms that druggists offered: ungula, magisterium, and destillatum (figure 8.3).41 The elk hoof, as an alchemical distillate, talisman, or powder, was incorporated in what were called the chemical-galenic pharmacopeias that proliferated from the seventeenth century onward. Ungula Alces, vulgarly called “the elk claw” was a cloven hoof, moderately large, of a shining black color, very hard and considerably heavy. The druggist generally took care to have a part of the leg of the animal with it to show that it was truly the foot of the elk and not of some similar animal. The authentic elk hoof was brought from the “cold countries,” namely Muscovy, Lithuania, and Scandinavia; care had to be taken that it was not worm-eaten or decayed, which sometimes happened, especially when too much soft tissue remained attached and it was insufficiently dried (figure 8.4). Falsifications, however, abounded.

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Transcontinental Nails Where the gran bestia went, so did the virtues of their feet and skin. This was not only a function of analogy but also a practical result of the expansion of the virtues of the remedies, charms, and preparations that traveled back and forth between the Americas and Europe along with the trade of books and materials. Gumilla’s observations would be incorporated into European remedy books, and included in the eighteenth-century translation into Spanish of the Charitable Remedies of Madame Marie Mapéau Fouquet, that “hotchpotch of traditional pharmacy (excrement, animal oils, echoes of old astrological medicine) and the fashionable remedies from the seventeenth century (mercury, antimony).”42 When originally published in French in 1675, Fouquet’s book said nothing about either South American tapirs or the great beast. However, the French edition from 1696 listed the so-called Poudre merveilleuse as one of the many recipes for curing epilepsy. Translated into Spanish in 1739, the collection of recipes incorporated the gran bestia twice: first, in the translation of the above-quoted recipe, where the ongle d’élan was translated as uña de la gran bestia,43 and second, as one of Father Gumilla’s observations, where the gran bestia was defined as the anta from Venezuela. Similarly, in the Spanish dictionaries from the late eighteenth century the elk had been replaced by the South American tapir: “anta” was an animal from the Indies, whose left nail was known as uña de la gran bestia.44 In today’s Argentina no one relates “anta” to the elk but to the local tapir. The use of the tapir’s nail continued into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Peruvian Amazonia, Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador, where a portion of the hoof of the tapir is believed to cure all ills, and a scrap of skin, a fragment of bone, or a tooth could be purchased on village street corners as a talisman to guarantee success in love and business.45 Whereas zoologists admitted to ignoring where “this superstition” came from, David Gade’s essay recalled that folk medicine, or what today is called “ethnomedicine” is a configuration with a very complex history that can be written and recovered, including the history of folklorization of medieval and early modern pharmacopeias and the transfer of names and therapeutic virtues from one natural object to another.46 At issue is the general notion about the environmental relationship between animals, people, and diseases, as well as the universalization of the different medical systems into which the “foreign” drugs were incorporated. And this brings us to the question of whether the use of the nail of the great beast in the Americas

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originated in the post-Columbian circulation of recipe books and drugs or—as Lévi-Strauss proposed—it is a kind of structural relation of nature/ culture that crossed and connected different peoples and cultures. Animal remedies were “part of the story of the Renaissance retrieval of ancient medicine, coupled with its confident assertion of present-day knowledge. . . . They also form part of the commercial justification for exploration and settlement, being seen as precious commodities.”47 Searching for analogies between animals from different continents was not independent from the possibility of trading in these remedies and amulets propagated by the new printing culture. Promoted by both Europeans and New World natives, it went hand in hand with the transfer to the natives of the Americas of the sixteenth century trope that “the common people possessed ‘secrets’ . . . a body of natural knowledge unknown to the savants.”48 Harold Cook had studied Dutch countries to explore the links between the emergence of modern science and the trade in medical drugs. This essay suggests that other scenarios and trading zones should be taken into account to understand the global uses of materials: the Spanish and Portuguese administrative centers, hubs of commerce with the Indies, centers of interaction between trade, book printing, and propagation of products and knowledge. Postscript At the end of the eighteenth century, the French anatomist Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) decided to create the name Megatherium (great beast in Greek) for the skeleton of a “rare animal” found in the environs of Buenos Aires and mounted as an almost complete skeleton in the Royal Museum in Madrid. In so doing, the extinct mammal from South America became the unequivocal great beast, and the only one. Maybe Cuvier decided to baptize a new species using a name of such vague meaning specifically to end a long-existing debate. Had he found inspiration in the notice made by the Spanish officer at the moment of the skeleton’s discovery? The draughtsman, trying to explain how big it was, compared the unknown animal not only with the elephant and rhinoceros but also with the anta or gran bestia. As the biggest mammal from the Americas, the eighteenth-century French naturalist Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, had called the tapir “the elephant of the New World.” Now, with the new principles of Cuvierian comparative anatomy, there was no doubt that the greatest beast from South America had passed away long ago.

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Almost at the same time, the universal superstition was proved to be a natural fact. An American naturalist, having had the opportunity in 1797 of observing four elks being exhibited for gain in the city of New York, observed: On the outside of each hind leg, the Elk has a small vesicle or bag, which contains a thin unctuous substance that the hunter calls oil, and the bag the oil-spring. The male is said to open this, by means of his horn, as the horns begin to grow; when the oil spreads over the young horn, and is supposed to nourish and protect it. This he does regularly, the keeper informed us, at 10 P.M. and at 4 A.M. The female has not been observed to make any use of this oil, except when wounded. She then, it is said, opens the bag with her tooth, and applies the oil, by means of her tongue to the wound.

In rutting-time, the Elk is represented as contriving to throw his urine upon this vesicle, which inflames in consequence, and emits a strong scent, whereby the animals discover each other in the woods. With regard to the superstitious notion concerning the Elk’s curing himself of the epilepsy, by means of his hind hoof, &c. . . . may it not be probable that the belief originated from the use he makes of the oil-spring, of which the earliest European writers might be ignorant?49 These vesicles and secretions, observed also in the reindeers and gazelles, explained everything. Their emanations and fetidness excited the nervous system and had, as other animal odors, antispasmodic effect. In the end, the hoof, a mere inert, lifeless animal substance, was a reference, a metaphor that invoked this capacity of the power of life. And at this point, physicians from the early nineteenth century had to admit that current superstitions were based on the observation of nature.50

Chapter 9 Translating Heaven Divination and Political Authority under the Yuan Dynasty Francesca Fiaschetti

In 1267, the newly subdued king of Đại Việt, Trần Thánh Tông (Chen Shengzong 陳聖宗, r. 1258–78), received the following requests from the Mongol emperor Qubilai (r. 1260–94), founder of the Yuan dynasty: “You should send [to me] here scholars, physicians and experts in the art of yinyang divination, craftsmen of all sorts, three of each kind, together with suheyou 蘇合油 [Styrax], guangxiang 光香 aromatic, gold, silver, cinnabar, aloeswood, sandalwood, elephant and rhinoceros ivory, turtle shell, silk, porcelain and similar products.”1 With these demands, Qubilai followed a long-established pattern of Inner Asian diplomacy, and, more generally, practices of interaction between Inner Asian nomads and their sedentary neighbors.2 By ensuring the movement of skilled people and precious goods across different regions of the Mongol Empire in East Asia, such diplomacy constituted an important channel through which cultural and scientific transfer took place.3 The result of such transfer, as is well known, was the translation of texts, creation of a syncretism between Western and Eastern systems of knowledge and, last but not least, the movement of people and goods. The transmission in particular of scientific and technical knowledge that resulted from this was one of the most prominent expressions of Mongol rule in Eurasia.

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Two dynamics were at the root of the scientific exchange taking place, as pointed out by Thomas Allsen: the agency of the imperial elite as a whole and the direct mediation of personnel involved in its service.4 In their mediating role, such personnel held a unique ideological position. The fostering of scientific knowledge in the context of the Mongol Empire profoundly influenced their lives. They were involved in the processes of translation themselves, and were appointed to new offices in the process.5 To fulfill their roles, they not only moved physically from one corner of the Mongol Empire in East Asia to the other, all at the service of Mongol rulers, but the prestige of their functions as well as the possibilities of making a career of such activities led to a reshaping of identities, the creation of new elites, and the incorporation of the old into new realities—in terms of knowledge and also of human capital and social structures. The social mobility that resulted was a further by-product of the translation of scientific ideas in Mongol Eurasia, and this has captured the growing attention of the scholarly public.6 Starting with the earliest studies devoted to the subject of cultural exchange under the Mongols, there has been, in recent years, increasing focus on particular branches of knowledge involved in exchange, and particularly geography, astronomy, and technology of craftsmanship.7 The studies involved have shed light on the material and practical details of scientific translation, originating a debate that is still current.8 This chapter is intended to add to the discussion by looking at divination as one foundation for scientific translation. Divination was one of the earliest ways that people tried to relate to nature. It also shows connections to many external disciplines such as mathematics (and game theory), astrology, astronomy, medicine, and others, making it an important potential vehicle for scientific and cultural exchange because of its range of contacts.9 Allsen has looked at the case of divination not just in terms of scientific exchange but also as an area in which the idea of agency was strongly connected to matters of imperial legitimation.10 Divination interpreted the will of Heaven.11 It functioned as a means of endorsing the current legitimacy of the ruling dynasty, while also ensuring its future reign.12 In fact, the sponsorship of divination practices and various state rituals was a crucial matter for the imperial house, leading to the compilation, transmission, and preservation of much information on this topic in state-sponsored historiography.13 The case of divination is, therefore, a most fitting case for analyzing the dynamics of translation under the Mongols, first as a process of exchange on a linguistic and literary level, but also as a social dynamic leading to im-

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portant changes in the administration and perception of scientific knowledge in Mongol Eurasia. The strong political interests behind the fostering of divination led to the entanglement of the translation of knowledge, with more socially and culturally relevant dynamics of elite construction and the institutionalization of systems of knowledge (and of the administrative structures related to them). The present analysis is based on three main concepts. First, it addresses the idea of translation of words, and of the “conceptual worlds” behind them.14 How did the language related to divination change in the context of Mongol China, and how was this connected to previous patterns of cross-cultural exchange in Eurasia? This aspect relates to the issue of translation as “overcoming obstacles,” as presented in the introduction to this volume. As this essay will argue, the translation of terminology related to divination under the Mongols was instead a search for “functional analogues” among practices that had been in contact between East and West for centuries.15 The usage of divination as a means of imperial legitimacy was, in fact, a common element shared by the Mongols, as well as by the people they subjugated, in both the East and the West. It is mainly because of such shared ideas (of political ideology and legitimation), and of shared practices, that a scientific translation was possible at all under the Mongols. The main “obstacle,” if there was one at all, lay in the “foreignness” of the imperial Mongols as the ruling dynasty of China, and their need to find a universally valid rhetoric of legitimation. This was a major driving force that led to the gathering and fostering of different practices of divination at the Mongol courts, according to the principle of “redundancy,” as shown below. The key issue here is cultural identity—of the rulers and their subjects—and how this was mirrored in the language related to divination. A second point is the social aspect of translation, as a physical movement and advancement of specialized personnel into the Yuan elite. Here, the idea of “agency” promoted by Allsen can be also understood as “authorial intent,” because it actively engaged these individuals at the Mongol court or within the leading offices for the translation of science, and thus encouraged the promotion of specific branches of knowledge.16 At the same time, Mongol agency in fostering divination changed the way that this discipline was referred to (i.e., in terms of “science”), and to a different understanding of what was considered legitimate science or not (magic, sorcery, etc.). In the case of Mongol rule in China, as it will be shown, the common factor at the base of this process lies in the understanding of science, scholarship, and political authority as mirroring each other, and all

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as representations of divine charisma.17 Further, the chapter addresses the question of the significance of the Mongol era in the translation of science across Eurasia. The relevance of divination to the imperial project of the Mongols led to processes of centralization and institutionalization and to the creation of administrative structures that facilitated and immensely increased scientific translation in this period. Words At the base of the translation involved were words and the cultural perspectives that they conveyed. A first necessary step here is a review of the basic terms that the Mongols used, including the ideas that these terms conveyed about the Mongol worldview—and the place that divination occupied within it. The great importance of divinatory practices among the Mongols is attested by a relatively large corpus of texts transmitted to us about astronomy, astrology, and divination. These texts confirm the highly syncretic nature of Mongolian divination, in which practices, terms, and ideas had been borrowed from China and especially Tibet, well before the creation of the empire.18 The famous attempt of Charles R. Bawden to classify the various kinds of divination practices among the Mongols (and their Inner Asian predecessors) divides these practices into two categories of divination, one dependent on astronomy and one independent of it.19 The first category, as has been shown in several studies, is attested in several extant Mongolian and Old Uighur manuscripts.20 The second category is further divided into involuntary divination (the reading of omens, such as dreams) and voluntary divination—that is, the reading of signs.21 In turn, as Volker Rybatzki points out, this latter kind of divination implied taking an action in order to read the signs.22 It is among the divination practices of the second category that cultural exchange (or translation) took place most extensively: language itself reflected such transfer along with the roots of the practices involved..23 Despite attempts at classification, the very nature of divination practices and diviners’ activities remains fuzzy. The uncertainty of interpretation can even be traced back to the thirteenth century’s Secret History of the Mongols. In a famous passage referring to Ögödei’s illness during his campaign in North China, shamans and diviners are requested to investigate causes: “Ögödei qahan [then] set up camp at Shira-dektür, where he fell ill, lost [the use of] [his] mouth and tongue, and was in [great] distress. Vari-

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ous shamans and soothsayers [bö’es tölgecin-e tölgele’ülü’esü; were made to make a pronouncement]: The spirit-lords of the Kitad people’s lands and waters rage violently [against the Qahan], [for] their kinsmen have been plundered and their towns and cities have been destroyed.”24 A key element in this passage is the phrase bö’es tölgecin-e tölgele’ülü’esü, which has been interpreted as meaning a distinction was made between shamans and other practitioners of divination.25 Tölgeci has been understood as “the makers of tölge,” meaning divination by signs.26 The distinction between shamans and tölgeci is then related to the fact that shamans were able to speak to the spirits. In fact, both figures convey an idea of the present—and the future— as determined by divine forces. But whereas both kinds of specialists were able to practice divination, it is the ability to speak directly to the spirits that characterizes a shaman.27 The Mongol elite carefully preserved, even in foreign contexts, its own identity and distinctive practices, as embodied in the above-mentioned spiritual distinction (also in social terms) regarding the figure of the shaman. Evidence can be found for this, among other places, in records from the Yuan dynasty, when the shamans had a prominent role in the state cults related to ancestors.28 Furthermore, as Allsen pointed out, another important element of this passage is the interconnection of divination and medicine, something that was common in Inner Asian and East Asian representations.29 In fact, in the Inner Asian cultural realm, in the Qutadtu bilig (Wisdom of Royal Glory), a document about Turkish ideology from the eleventh century, the relationship between physicians and the divination experts is explicitly stated in the section about the latter:30 “They treat those ills which are caused by devil or a demon. You ought to be in good terms with them as well, in case you need them to utter a spell against an illness of that sort. So treat them kindly if you wish to profit from them. The physician does not like the diviner’s spell, as the diviner turns his back on the physician. So take the medicine the one prescribes to cure your sickness, and grasp the amulet the other incants to drive away the devils.”31 The context that reveals the connection between medicine and divination is a specific representation of nature as the mixture of physical and spiritual phenomena. The comparison between the tasks of physicians and diviners recalls, in fact, not only the role of shaman, but a specific representation of the body. Thus Brian Baumann (basing his approach on the theories of Sivin) writes: “To explain the connection between mathematics and medicine [i.e., also divination] scholars cite the concepts of the body as a microcosm of the universe. Thus, it is no coincidence that in China

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and for the Mongols the terms ‘to govern’ a nation and ‘to treat’ an illness are the same (Ch. zhi 治, Mong. baja-), both take their basic meaning as ‘to overcome disorder.’”32 The linguistic correspondence that Baumann and Sivin point out, confirmed by Chinese authors, is central to the ideological perspective of the Medieval Mongols. The idea of “governing” is, in this context, a key element in the representation of science and knowledge. It is this shared concept that served as a basis for scientific translation between the Mongols and their Chinese neighbors. The idea was something that unified divination experts and the ruler, as they both had the task of managing (zhi 治) reality, on the one side a political task and on the other a spiritual one. The correspondences between these two realms, their resonance, and the idea that “government” is a technique, appears to be an increasingly prominent rhetorical feature in the sources from the Yuan period, as will be shown later. These and other sources also show how the Mongols approached the plurality of forms of divination and the religious beliefs connected with them. They were looking for “shaman-like” figures.33 They sought technicians of the multiform heavenly signs or “magic men,” as Paul Buell defines them.34 Mongol understanding of the figure of the shamans served therefore as a lens to perceive, represent, and approach similar realities in the populations submitting to them. This was the case, for example, in the instance of Tibetan bakshi and in that of yin-yang 陰陽 divination in China, which, as Joseph Needham points out, was similar to shamanism.35 The starting concept of the imperial (and pre-imperial) Mongols, as represented in the polyhedric figures of shamans, was that divination encompassed several disciplines and realms of knowledge. As a result, the Mongols’ approach to foreign practices brought a certain genericity of translation, or the fusion of different concepts altogether. Similar to the loose distinction encountered in the case of the term tölgeci, an overall generalization about disciplines, schools, and divination practices is to be found, for example, in Arabic and Persian sources about the reign of the Ilkhanid ruler Hülegü (1217–65).36 Another example, particularly relevant to the present study, is the use of the term yin-yang in Chinese sources from the Yuan period. In them the term assumes a new, general connotation, similar to that of the tölgeci of the Mongol Secret History above. Again, in the translation of this term in a Mongolian context, the mediation of foreign cultures was at work. So Baumann points out that the idea of yin-yang (Mong. arγ-a bilig) appears in Mongolian sources—and with the mediation of Buddhism—through reference to complementary relations.37 But in Yuan documents it is clear

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that the term yin-yang has become simply a general reference to non-Mongolian divination practitioners, to the practices and institutions related to them.38 It refers mostly to geomancy, a practice that—as A. Sarközy maintains—was known but not spread among the Mongols as widely as it was among their Chinese neighbors.39 The nonspecific character of this label is noticeable in the sources of various levels, first of all through the fact that it did not refer to a particular ethnicity or school of thought. The only distinction was between Chinese practitioners (han´er 漢兒), and Western ones, that is, Persian and generally Muslim diviners (huihui 回回).40 Among the biographies of yin-yang practitioners, two are of particular relevance, as they show the generic nature of this all-embracing term.41 One is the biography of Jin Dejin 靳德進, a former subject of the Jurchen; the other is that of Tian Zhongliang 田忠良 (1243–1318). Although they both came to work for Qubilai under the label of experts of yin-yang divination, the tasks and disciplines they embraced with their expertise were distinct. The first was an expert in calendrical studies and astronomy, whereas the second employed a wide variety of divination practices.42 Among services requested from the latter was calculation of good days for battle, physiognomy, the reading of omens, weather magic, dunjia 遁甲 divination, and even some medicine.43 One last aspect to consider is the idea of redundancy. As shown in the Secret History, the Mongols were interested in using multiple forms of divination—both foreign and indigenous—at the same time. Even in later periods, Mongol courts were full of experts of the various disciplines, as Marco Polo famously reports in the case of Qubilai.44 This had the important political function of allowing legitimation and acceptance of a foreign power by the subdued people.45 By using divination methods typical of the subdued population, in fact, the legitimacy of the Mongol emperors could find reflection in multiple cultural contexts. On the other side, for the subdued people, it was also a matter of integration into the new imperial system. Some examples of this process will be analyzed below. Science, Knowledge, Power Divination at the Mongol courts was, however, not only a prerogative of specialized cadres. As recorded in accounts from different parts and moments of the Mongol empire and world, it is reported that members of the Mongol elite, more specifically emperors, performed divination, mainly in the form of scapulimancy, because of its high political status. This practice

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Figure 9.1. Divination experts under the Yuan. Zhu Yu (Zhu Junbi), 1293–1365. Street Scenes in Times of Peace (Taiping fenghui tu 太平風會圖), Yuan dynasty (1279–1368). Handscroll; ink and colors on paper. Kate S. Buckingham Endowment, 1952.8, The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY.

is said by Badwen to have been characteristic of the Mongols and Inner Asian nomads.46 In fact, accounts of scapulimancy by the Mongols are to be found in sources relating to the pre-imperial period as well as in early reports about the Mongol Empire, for example, in the famous account of William of Rubruck.47 Another example is the case of the Ilkhanid emperor Hülegü, about whom it is said: “Since he was passionate for all branches of learning, he pursued and learned geomancy and horses’ collar bones and teeth and other signs by which good and bad fortunes have been tested and recorded in books, and various fortune-telling devices practiced by every nation and country.”48 The practice of scapulimancy by the Mongol elite was thus linked to issues of preserving Inner Asian identity and the even more important activity of ensuring legitimacy in Mongol terms. The fact that the emperors practiced divination indicates, on the other hand, that there was a strong connection between political figures and the

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sciences that related to the understanding of Heaven. This included peers and advisers to the imperial elite. In fact, not only did the Mongols gather specialists and technicians of divination, but the performance of divination was one of the tasks frequently requested of political advisers and prominent statesmen, no matter what their expertise in this science. The two most famous cases are found in the biographies of two Mongol-era statesmen: the former Jin official Yelu Chucai 耶律楚材 (1190–1244) and Liu Binzhong 劉秉忠 (1216–74), the advisers of Chinggis, Ögödei, and Qubilai.49 Both of these statesmen were required to perform divination at court.50 In particular, Liu Bingzhong is credited also with the promotion of yin-yang divination during the Yuan and particularly the dunjia doctrine.51 During his career he acted as a prominent recruiter of skilled personnel, as is particularly evident in the fact that he was responsible for recruiting both Jin Dejin and Tian Zhongliang at Qubilai’s court.52 The biographies of Yelu Chucai and Liu Binzhong provide interesting details about the role of the divination experts, in showing a “resonance” between the deeds of the emperors and the will of Heaven. The idea of “translatability” of the order of Heaven into the political government of men is related to a precise representation of the cosmos as disorder and order, with the world as a reflection of it. This deeply influenced how science, technical skills, and expertise in general were perceived: they were seen as ways of creating order and managing disorder. It is in fact in the biography of Yelü Chucai that we find the famous mention of “governing” in the terms discussed above: [Chucai] said, “Even for making  (zhi治)  bows one respects and requires a craftsman of bow [making]; why, [if one would] govern  (zhi 治)  ‘all under heaven’ not employ a craftsman of governing ‘all under heaven’?” When [Chinggis] heard this he was very pleased, and from this he employed [Chucai] daily more intimately.53

A similar notion is found in the biography of Liu Bingzhong: “Thus, the way of ordering chaos is to bond with Heaven and rely on men.”54 Such rhetoric creates a parallel between divination and politics, as they shared the same task of putting into order different realms. They also shared a connection to ideas of cosmic order and cosmic dynamics, therefore constituting an embodiment of the Heavenly will. The aim of divination was to show the concordance in the way followed by the ruler and by his statesmen, that is, the adequacy of the ruler’s way of governing.55

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In the case of Chinese sources, this idea is framed in terms of resonance between the soul or heart (xin 心) of the ruler and the results obtained by the divination expert. Thus, in the biography of Tian Zhongliang, Qubilai is worried about a matter internal to the imperial court and addresses the divination expert with the following words: “My heart feels uneasy, discern [the reason for] this through divination.”56 Another example is the occasion when Tian Zhonglang was requested to perform a physiognomy divination: As they were hunting, the Emperor looked for Zhonglang in the crowd of ministers and said: “Today I want to honor one general of the campaigns in the South. My heart is already set (朕心已定), what should the result be?” Zhonglang looked left and right, and saw a person and replied: “This one is a strong and valid master, he is capable of great things.” The Emperor laughed and said: “this is Bayan, I have been already using his services as he has been sent by the King of the West, Hülegü. You know my heart (汝識朕心).”57

Institutionalization and Imperial Prerogative A second result of the parallel between the right way of conduct and government and the correct results of divination was that divination was held in high consideration, was “respectable,” and was considered a science. More specifically, it seems that once again the connection with imperial legitimation—and the effectiveness of divination in justifying imperial policies—were the criteria to determine its value. In the biography of Jin Dejin, yin-yang divination is proved effective against the opponents of Qubilai’s power. Because of Arig Böke’s defeat in battle, his diviners were considered to be sorcerers (yaoren 妖人), whereas the advisers of Qubilai were referred to as “people of knowledge” (shushi 術士).58 Qubilai was thus requested to institutionalize the “good science” through the establishment of offices.59 The contrast between sorcery and divination is sharpened by the usage of the terms “savant, scholar” (shushi 術士) in contrast to the more common labeling in terms of “methods and techniques; method-based expertise” (fangji 方技), which had often been used, in previous periods, in relation to divination, and expressed a different (lower) status of this science.60 Similarly, this process of legitimation of the tools used by the winner was not a prerogative of the Chinese sources. In many accounts reported by Persian sources, a distinction between divination and witchcraft was made, possibly on the bases of Islamic concepts. Sorcery was then used as a tool to condemn political opponents to the Mongol ruling elite.61

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The elevation of successful divination to a more prominent role was achieved, in Yuan China, through two methods: institutionalization and examinations on one side, centralization on the other side. Again, the biography of Tian Zhongliang provides details on the first aspect, the imposition of examinations: “Subsequently Qubilai requested the minister of the right, the guard Yesenai, to send Tian Zhonglang to the Bureau of Astronomy and provide him with various (learning) materials. Liu Bingzhong was ordered to check him in all the writings about calendrical studies and dunjia divination. Liu Binzhong said: ‘In everything he was examined, he passed. Of all the talents in the Bureau of Astronomy, there is no one who could surpass such a result. Therefore he was put in charge of the Bureau.’”62 Moreover, in the thirteenth-century collection of laws in the Yuan dian zhang, we find information about the relevant exams being held on a regional level every year. The best students were then sent to the capital, in accordance with what is stated in the biography of Jin Dejin. 63 The selection of the best candidates to be sent to the capital testifies to the centralization of the practice of divination, under direct state sponsorship. Another way in which centralization was achieved was through laws aimed at containing the practices of divination and the diffusion of related texts outside the imperial circle. This issue has been studied in detail by Elizabeth Endicott-West, who analyzes the attempt of Qubilai to apply such controls.64 Another reason behind the centralization was the forwarding of an imperial prerogative in the area. In this regard, the policies related to divination paralleled other attempts at accumulating “universal knowledge” as a means of displaying the universal sovereignty of the emperors. For example, Qubilai established an office in charge not of astronomical previsions alone, but also including divination—his Bureau of Astronomy (sitian tai 司天臺)—in 1271, just after the official proclamation of the Yuan dynasty.65 Not only the knowledge of Heaven but the command of Earth was considered an important imperial prerogative. Therefore, Qubilai also promoted geographical translation, combining Western (Persian) and Eastern forms of geographical knowledge. The Compendium of Universal Geography dayuan dayitongzhi (大元大一統志), redacted under the supervision of Jamal-al Din, is one product of this sponsorship.66 Another example of the overlapping of realms of knowledge, as well as the value of science as a mirror of imperial prerogative, is attested in the multidisciplinary nature of administrative structures, such as the mishujian 秘書監 (Palace Library). This functioned as a coordinating institution

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for the offices dedicated to the study of geography, astronomy and yinyang divination (i.e., geomancy). On the one hand, personnel were chosen through suggestion of the ruling elite, but on the other, the very dynamics of the Chinese administrative system were at work.67 It goes without saying that the realization of such projects, and the gathering of specialized books and personnel at the imperial court, demanded the creation of new specialized institutions and offices. Following Chen Gaohua, who devoted several studies to the geographical and administrative aspects of this movement, we can see in this process of bureaucratization of knowledge one of the main innovations of the Yuan dynasty in terms of social structures, administrative practice, and promotion of science.68 Conclusion Divination, and more generally cultural and scientific exchange under Mongol rule, have been at the center of scholarly attention for decades. By comparing the main representations of divination in the Mongol United Empire and the Yuan dynasty, the present study aimed at showing the dynamics underlying scientific translation under Mongol rule. The process of scientific translation under Mongol rule had various aims and exhibited different layers of interaction. Three elements in particular have emerged from the examples given above. First, the Mongols approached foreign realities through the lens of their own concepts.69 Some recurring patterns can be found in both the Eastern and Western parts of the empire, most notably the tendency to preserve the identity of the ruling elite by maintaining several Mongolian traditions (or even Mongolian and Islamic traditions side by side).70 The Mongols thus used the practice of divination —and the language related to it—to preserve a distinction between themselves and their subject, which was functional to their political legitimacy. As an opposite yet complementary process of legitimation, translation served as a “search for equivalents” of Mongol concepts in the foreign contexts.71 On a linguistic level, this led to a new interpretation of terms already in use in local sources, such as the Chinese ones. A main result of this shift in terminology was a relative generality in the transmission of ideas. Second, on a more practical level, the uncertainty of translation left room for the agency of those individuals who could mediate between the foreign ruling elite and the subjugated populations. In a recent discussion, Wolfgang Behr addressed similar issues in relation to the broader premises and implications of the act of translation in ancient China. He analyzes

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in particular the idea present in Chinese tradition that translation was an “exchange,” and thus a client service–oriented process.72 In this framework, translation can indeed be treated—following Behr’s hypothesis—as a contract and as an exchange aimed at legitimizing power at the imperial as well as at the local and even individual levels. Third, the ideological perspective of the Mongol elite resulted from a specific understanding of science and knowledge, as mirroring imperial charisma, led to the introduction of a different rhetoric related to such disciplines, and consequently to the ideological advancement of fields of knowledge that, before the Yuan period, were not considered authoritative, such as divination. Similarly, scientific skills and technological expertise became real capital for social advancement. The individuals requested as tribute by Qubilai in the edict that opened this study served not as mere slaves, entertainers, or labor force, but had the possibility to find, in their role as scientific translators, a new identity and a better career. Mongol policies toward scientific knowledge and its translators, thus, opened the way to a new understanding of human capital that influenced the subsequent rulers of China throughout the centuries. In sum, what does the example of divination in Yuan China tell us about broader dynamics of scientific translation in Eurasia? If we examine the case study presented here in a larger time scale, two aspects emerge. First, the period of Mongol rule in Eurasia included a rapid increase in projects of scientific translation. The practical outcomes of this dynamic, which can be considered a contribution of Mongol rule and a peculiarity of the Yuan in East Asia, are to be seen in the material aspects of the translation of science in specific books and also in the transfer of ideas and knowledge from West or East. Second, the premises and strategies of translating ideas related to divination were built on previous dynamics of cultural contacts linking religions and scientific disciplines between Inner and East Asia. The sources analyzed here show how recurring ideas and terminology were given different meanings before and after the creation of the Yuan dynasty. In this sense, the idea of “translation” identifies an ongoing process—and not merely an outcome—of centuries of cross-cultural, political, and diplomatic exchanges across Eurasia.

Chapter 10 Between Local and Universal Translating Knowledge in Early Modern Ottoman Plague Treaties Nükhet Varlık

The Black Death, the great hemispheric plague pandemic of the mid-fourteenth century, was one of the most catastrophic events in human history. Despite the many contentious aspects of this historical phenomenon, such as its geographic origins, routes and mechanisms of contagion, as well as its temporal and spatial extent, the mortality it caused across the Afro-Eurasian zone was indisputably staggering: even with a cautious estimate, 40–60 percent of all the population of Europe, western Asia, and North Africa were killed in just a few years’ time, between 1346 and 1353.1 Following the Black Death, plague returned to the Mediterranean world in periodic intervals, from the late medieval through the early modern eras. This prolonged presence of plague is generally referred to as the Second Plague Pandemic, in view of the Justinianic Plague (ca. 541–750)— the first historically documented pandemic of plague.2 Not unlike the First Pandemic, the recurrences of plague during the Second Pandemic remind us of two characteristic features of the etiology and epidemiology of this disease: (1) on being introduced to a new locality, if the plague pathogen (Yersinia pestis) finds a favorable ecological context, it tends to return in periodic epidemic waves; and (2) depending on differences in ecological contexts, the disease shows a wide spectrum of variation over space and time.3 The same characteristics could also be observed during the Third 177

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Pandemic, which, starting in the late nineteenth century, spread rapidly across the globe by steamships and railroads.4 Since the plague pathogen responds differently to local climatic, ecological, and environmental circumstances, the resulting epidemics can assume a variety of manifestations. For example, different species of rodents host the pathogen in different regions of the world. Moreover, the specifics of local epidemiological experience can vary not only from region to region but also within one region over time. For this reason, while it is important to study plague closely in different ecological settings, it is equally important to remember that significant variations stem from historical interactions between the disease and the local conditions of different contexts. The knowledge of plague’s etiology and epidemiology can hardly be accepted as universally applicable. Despite being hemispheric or global phenomena, pandemics of plague thus lend themselves well to micro-level inquiries. In fact, they can be most productively explored in a manner that allows conversation between universal and local experiences. Such an approach affords the study of local variations, the ways in which plague was experienced by different societies, and the responses it generated in different contexts, without losing sight of the universal. At this point, it might be helpful to draw attention to the cautionary tale of how, in recent decades, modern historical scholarship turned to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century manifestations of the plague in east and south Asia and mistook this “local” experience of disease as a token of “universal” plague.5 The results of this misreading of history, coupled with a reticence fueled by a methodological awareness of retrospective diagnosis proved nearly detrimental for the field of historical epidemiology: it brought about confusion that hurt the historical scholarship of plague for decades by creating polarization and open conflict between historians, and rendered the field almost moribund at the turn of the twenty-first century. Even until recently, historians hesitated to state that the Black Death was a pandemic of plague caused by Y. pestis.6 It was the outsiders—in this case, bioarchaeologists and paleogeneticists—who offered a way out of these moribund controversies. Today, we can safely talk about a new plague paradigm that accepts the consensus of the geneticist community as a given: that all three pandemics of plague were caused by Y. pestis.7 Taking this particular position is critical for it allows interdisciplinary inquiry while inviting a dialogue between historical and scientific studies of plague. One of the avenues this research opens up is to explore the plague at the level of the “local,” while keeping it in dialogue with the “universal.”

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This essay will focus on the Ottoman Empire and its experience of plague in the early modern era. It especially aims to highlight two historical processes that may have worked in tandem: the vernacularization of plague ecologies and the vernacularization of plague knowledge. It will explore how the Ottoman experience of plague was understood by its contemporaries to be different from a body of knowledge about the disease that they inherited from earlier works. In doing so, it will survey the genre of plague treatises and how these works served as a medium for the production, interpretation, and dissemination of plague knowledge, both within and outside the Ottoman Empire, facilitating the multifaceted process of vernacularization. Ultimately, my goal here is to show that both the disease itself and the knowledge of it took different forms and meanings in different contexts, as a result of biological, social, and historical factors. Vernacularization of Plague What is a “vernacular disease”? Does it mean “indigenous,” “endemic,” or “native” to a particular locality or group of people? At the turn of the twentieth century, the meaning of the term “vernacular,” though almost always understood to be used in relation to language, could be extended to “characteristic of a locality: as vernacular architecture” or “vernacular disease,” which was defined as “a disease which prevails in a particular country or district; an epidemic, or more accurately an endemic disease.”8 Even though the term did not make its way into the twentieth-century medical and epidemiological terminology, its use at a time when the field of modern epidemiology was in the making points to the lingering premodern associations between epidemic disease and place, as well as people who populate that place. Biologically speaking, plague is not “endemic” (native or indigenous to human populations), though it can be enzootic (endemic to animal populations). It can occur in epizootic eruptions (causing high-level mortality in animal populations) and occasionally spill over to human populations, causing human mortality. It should be remembered that plague is a zoonosis (animal-to-human disease) that primarily affects rodents; humans are only accidental hosts to it. It has a complex etiology that involves a system of entanglements between rodent hosts, arthropod vectors, the pathogen, human populations, and the environment. These agents interact with one another, while they themselves change in response to their interactions with other organisms and the broader environment. Historical and con-

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temporary cases of plague show a wide array of diversity: different plague ecologies can involve different hosts, vectors, and even different clinical symptoms of the disease as experienced by humans. In other words, there is no universal plague ecology that would hold true for all local experiences. For this reason, it is all the more important to listen to local voices (in historical sources) and learn more about the set of biological, climatic, and environmental complex that sustained the disease as it was experienced in local contexts. To better understand notions such as “plague experience” or “local experience of plague,” I turn to the concept of “local biologies” put forward by the anthropologist Margaret Lock and in recent discussions of this concept in the context of global health.9 These “local biologies” or “local disease ecologies” are not only important because they shed light on biological, environmental, and social processes that sustain the disease. They are also significant because it was this local experience that informed the observations of those who wrote about it. In other words, as the disease took hold in a certain locality and kept recurring according to certain patterns—became vernacularized, that is—the observations drawn from it reflect the local biologies or local disease experiences. Hence, by definition, that body of knowledge is vernacularized. If the locals of a certain region experienced, observed, and interacted with disease in its vernacular manifestations, it only follows that they produced vernacular disease narratives, histories, and lore. The historian Ann Carmichael demonstrates, in the example of late medieval European plagues, how the language of plague reflected the transition from universal plague knowledge to particularized knowledge that was defined and based on local experience.10 The latest research on English and French plague treatises from the late medieval and early modern eras offers further nuances on the interplay between the universal and the local. While during and in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death, treatise writers imagined the plague to be a universal phenomenon, over time, their understanding and explanation of recurrent waves of the plague became localized to “this plague” and “in this place.”11 It is possible to observe the process of vernacularization in the Ottoman plague experience from the Black Death through the sixteenth century. I discuss elsewhere in greater detail how the Ottoman Empire was repeatedly visited by waves of plague during this period.12 Here, I shall limit the discussion to the main aspects of this process. First, the rapid expansion of Ottoman power stimulated an increased level of communication, interaction, and mobility between individual domains that were

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brought together by conquest and by the formation of administrative, military, and commercial networks of a centralizing empire. Second, the new connectedness of an emerging empire offered new mobilities of exchange conducive to increased circulation of disease. Much like people, animals, and goods, plague circulated along those emerging networks. Third, the overall increased incidence of plague led to new epidemiological patterns: the intervals between recurring outbreaks gradually diminished; the regions touched by outbreaks steadily expanded; and the patterns of epidemic spread both within and outside the Ottoman lands were transformed. It was thus this new epidemiological experience that shaped the notions Ottoman society held, the images they conceived, and the cognizance they formed from these conceptions. It also molded the norms and principles by which the Ottomans positioned themselves vis-à-vis the plague, as well as their attitude, affect, and response.13 Plagues Treatises and Vernacularization The plague pandemic of the late medieval and early modern eras generated a rich body of literature across the Mediterranean world. In particular, plague treatises became the main medium for the articulation, preservation, and circulation of knowledge about the disease. The genre quickly spread in both Europe and the Islamic world yielding a great number of works across centuries. Even though examples of the genre differed greatly in size, language, and approach, some common conventions developed over time. In the main, these tracts discussed the causes of plague and often offered medical advice for prophylactic and therapeutic purposes. From the late nineteenth century onward, European scholars began to recognize the importance of these treatises for studying the plague. It was first the Austrian scholar Alfred von Kremer, who, in the 1880s, took an interest in studying plague treatises. He collected tracts written in the Islamic world after the Black Death and examined them for his work on the history of epidemic diseases in Islam.14 Later, D. W. Singer and Karl Sudhoff studied European plague tracts written from the Black Death to 1500.15 These early efforts helped map out the existing examples of the genre, yet they inspired little further research on the subject.16 Historians disregarded plague tracts because the general opinion about them was that they were repetitive, obscure, and not of great value. Even when they were used, it was mainly for data-mining purposes, without serious engagement with them as sources.

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In the 1970s, there was a renewed interest in plague treatises, especially those written in the Islamic world. Among these, Jacqueline Sublet focused on the plague treatise of Ibn Hajar al-ʿAsqalani (d.1448); Michael Dols, on that of Ibn al-Wardi (d.1349); and Lawrence Conrad, on the tract of Ibn Abi Hajala (d.1375).17 In his research on plague epidemics in early Islamic history, Lawrence Conrad observed that Islamic plague treatises had many common features and could be studied as a genre with common social and cultural aspects.18 These studies provided the intellectual background for Colin Jones, who, in an insightful article on early modern French plague tracts, showed how these treatises could be used in novel ways.19 Jones suggested that these texts should be rescued from the neglect and contempt surrounding them and be treated as a genre in its own right. In this regard, he praised the work of Conrad on Islamic plague tracts, for taking the problem of genre seriously. By paying special attention to the language and metaphors used in the texts, Jones tackles the context of symbolism in which plague tracts were meaningful and restores the disease into the cultural and political history of the period. Modern scholarship on European and Islamic plague tracts developed separately, making these corpuses appear incompatible. However, the similarities in the evolution of the genre beg for future research with a comparative perspective. Here, I shall offer some preliminary observations about the changes the examples of the genre produced at both ends of the Mediterranean seem to have gone through, more or less contemporaneously. The most obvious transformation is that both corpuses switched to vernacular languages, following the Black Death. In the case of Europe, treatises started out in Latin but then were increasingly produced in the vernacular languages of Europe (mainly English, French, and Italian). In the Islamic world, plague treatises were originally composed in Arabic but increasingly became vernacular. Examples of the genre in Ottoman Turkish, Persian, and Urdu started to appear in the aftermath of the Black Death, though somewhat later than in Europe. The main difference in the dissemination of the texts was that in Europe, plague treatises started circulating in print whereas in the Islamic world, they remained mainly in manuscript form. The transformation in the language was most likely related to a change in the authorship and audience of treatises. Both in Europe and the Islamic world, treatise writers started to produce works for the general public, instead of writing for physicians alone. Likewise, the identity and professional background of treatise writers also started becoming more diverse.

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Gradually, more authors from nonmedical backgrounds, such as jurists, historians, and other scholars started composing plague tracts. Perhaps most important for our purposes here, treatises also reflect a process of vernacularization of knowledge about the disease, drawn from local experiences. Before turning our attention to this process, however, it would be helpful to take a closer look at the Ottoman plague tracts. Ottoman Plague Tracts In the Ottoman Empire, early examples of the genre started to appear in the early fifteenth century, primarily composed in Arabic. The works of ʿAbdurrahman Bistami (d. 1455), Wasf al-dawaʾ fi kashf afat al-wabaʾ (Description of the remedy on the discovery of calamities of epidemic), and al-Adʿiyyah al-muntakhabah fi al-adwiyyah al-mujarrabah (Select prayers on proven prescriptions) are among the earlier plague treatises written in Ottoman domains.20 Generally speaking, the early treatises targeted a learned audience, even if they were not strictly limited to the use of physicians. The number of plague tracts in Arabic proliferated over the course of the sixteenth century, with new works being composed, and earlier ones copied. It is not until the second half of the sixteenth century that we see the appearance of tracts translated to vernacular Ottoman Turkish, soon followed by the appearance of treatises composed in the vernacular language. This was also a time when treatise writers became a more diverse group, as historians, jurists, and other scholars started composing plague tracts. Informing these authors’ works was a body of established genre of Arabic plague treatises, composed before and after the Black Death, both in Ottoman and non-Ottoman areas.21 Throughout the early modern era, Ottoman intellectuals copied, translated, annotated, and composed tracts, which resulted in a substantial body of literature. The genre thrived, and countless plague tracts were produced until the last decades of Ottoman history. The living testimony of this prolific genre is the large number of surviving manuscripts of Ottoman plague tracts. This extensive corpus produced over nearly half a millennium is almost entirely in manuscript form—unpublished and unedited. The fact that the genre continued over a very long time led most modern scholars to believe that these were unchanging, unoriginal copies of earlier Arabic tracts. It has even been suggested that the genre was limited to the Arabic language, and that no plague treatise ever existed in Turkish and Persian languag-

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es.22 The twentieth-century Turkish historian of medicine Süheyl Ünver listed many important plague treatises in a pioneering article published in the 1930s.23 Despite his very insightful suggestions, no further research followed suit. Until recently, modern scholarship saw little value in these works; not even a catalogue of Ottoman plague tracts has been prepared. Most recent studies have started to pay closer attention to the examples of this corpus.24 Contrary to the prevailing belief that discredited the value of plague tracts, a close investigation reveals that these works included lively intellectual discussions reflecting important changes. Most important, treatise writers became more diverse and their tracts less specialized. It is true that there were treatises written strictly from a medical point of view. For example, İlyas bin İbrahim (Eliahu ben Avraham) (d. after 1512), an Iberian Jewish physician who moved to Istanbul around the turn of the sixteenth century and converted to Islam, wrote a plague treatise titled Majannah altaʿun wa al-wabaʾ (Refuge from plague and pestilence), which was strictly medical. However, the majority of sixteenth-century Ottoman tracts were produced by religious scholars and historians. For example, Chief Jurisconsult Kemalpaşazade (d. 1534) wrote Risalah fi al-taʿun (Treatise on plague); the Ottoman historian İdris-i Bidlisi (d. 1520) wrote Risalah al-ʿibaʾ ʿan mawaqiʿ al-wabaʾ (Treatise on avoiding places of infection); the theologian and biographer Ahmed Taşköprizade (d. 1561) wrote Risalah al-shifaʾ li-adwaʾ al-wabaʾ (Healing treatise for the treatment of plague), among others.25 Moreover, there are clear indications that these tracts were being composed for a lay audience. In the introduction, a treatise writer typically included some essential information, such as his own name, the title of the book, sources he had used, and a recent outbreak of plague, if any, as well as his reason for producing the work. Conventionally, the reason stated is “for the good of the general public.” Even though this appears to be a cliché of the genre, it is still important to take it into consideration because it might offer some clues about the problem of the audience. If these authors did indeed write for the general public, how do we identify the readership? Did the works really reach them? How do we know who read these tracts? The problem of audience is truly difficult to tackle. The presence of a vast number of copies of a certain work might be considered as an indication for its widespread readership. If manuscript copies of a tract are found in various locations, it may hint at its circulation throughout the empire. Yet this would not offer evidence about who was actually reading these works.

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Some works, in terms of language and content, were clearly addressed to medical practitioners. Students likely studied them for medical training. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of tracts was obviously written for lay readers, offering them advice about how to protect oneself during an epidemic. These works generally included recipes for a public that did not have easy access to medical practitioners. Meanwhile, some other texts were written for religious scholars, maybe for jurists or for the education of junior scholars, as they tackled religious and legal issues of conduct at times of plagues. The question of audience can be addressed by a closer reading of plague tracts, tracing how manuscripts changed hands, and who owned or copied them. The historian John Curry’s insightful essay traces the life and afterlife of a seventeenth-century legal treatise on plague. Curry shows how the original autograph copy of a plague tract composed by a Hanbali jurist in Cairo, Marʿī b. Yūsuf al-Karmī (d. 1624), found its way to Istanbul, how it ended up in the hands of a Hanafi jurist in the capital, and was later acquired by the Ottoman chief jurisprudent, offering additional evidence of copies owned by other Ottoman notables and possibly members of the dynastic family.26 This case study sheds invaluable light on little-known processes of production, circulation, and consumption of plague tracts in Ottoman society. Future research is needed to trace the circulation of other plague tracts. Vernacularization of Plague Knowledge in Ottoman Tracts The process of vernacularization not only involved changes in language, authorship, and audience. During this process, translators, authors, and copyists faced challenges beyond linguistic transition. As plague was understood to manifest itself differently across time and space, the Ottoman tract writers had to grapple with “universal” plague knowledge and make it compatible with “local” or “vernacular” knowledge. This effort was most visible in their discussions of plague’s etiology and epidemiology (e.g., seasonality and timing of plague outbreaks and patterns of mortality) as well as the methods of treatment they recommended (e.g., depending on local availability of pharmaceutical substances and how to adjust them to local circumstances). In what follows, I will offer some preliminary observations to highlight the process of vernacularization of plague knowledge in Ottoman plague treatises. In doing so, it might help to ask to what extent scholars were aware of these problems of incompatibility, how they dealt

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with them, and how they omitted, changed, or preserved information to fit them into the local context in which they themselves experienced the disease. Discussions of Plague’s Etiology and Epidemiology Taken as a whole, the corpus of Ottoman plague literature represents a complex system of disease etiology. In a nutshell, there was an accepted hierarchy of causes, at the top of which was God, without whom neither epidemics nor cure would be possible. Next in the hierarchy were celestial powers, cosmic influence of the stars, and other astronomic and astrological events. God, stars, and planets all exercised indirect influences through a more direct agent: the air, a substance that, once corrupted, could damage the vital powers of the living when breathed. The air was believed to be subjected to specific conditions in different locations. Hence, it was understood to display variations from place to place in terms of the effects of heat, humidity, and seasons. At the bottom of the hierarchy were humans (and animals), who either by their natural dispositions or through their regimen were capable of falling prey to disease. Within the general outlines of this hierarchical scheme of causation, there were individual differences of emphasis between different authors. While some put heavier emphasis on well-known causes of corrupt air or miasma, such as arising from swamps or soldiers fallen dead on battlefields, others chose to stress spiritual causes of plague, such as the power of evil spirits or the jinn. Nonetheless, this hierarchy of etiological explanations allowed causal factors to be attuned to local variations. Having the flexibility of using multiple systems of etiology, Ottoman treatise writers could establish connections between seemingly incongruent notions of causation. For example, the early sixteenth-century treatise of İlyas bin İbrahim insisted on the possibility of a causal relationship between earthquakes and plague, which he held was due to the unleashing of corrupt air to the surface of the earth. As he explicitly stated in the introduction of his tract, he composed his treatise following a major outbreak in Istanbul (perhaps that of 1509), fearing that it would lead to a plague outbreak.27 In this example, we see an etiological claim attuned specifically to local circumstances. In a similar vein, the mid-sixteenth-century plague treatise of Ahmed Taşköprizade suggested that the corruption of the air was related to terrestrial and celestial causes: “Corruption usually occurs at the end of the summer and during fall. During summer, bad residues come together and

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are in close contact with corrupt air.” At the same time, the treatise referred to the seasonal character of plague in an effort to explain why sporadic outbreaks affect one area but not others. Taşköprizade highlighted discussions of plague’s seasonality and periodicity and noted that plague mostly occurred during the spring and fall in areas with moderate climate, and rarely during hot summers and cold winters. He also added that sometimes it continued two years in a row, and other times it skipped a year or two.28 In so doing, Taşköprizade was clearly writing with the climatic conditions of Istanbul in mind. Even though his observations were partly based on earlier Arabic treatises, those works were mostly composed in places farther south of Istanbul, such as Damascus or Cairo, and did not necessarily correspond to the seasonality of plague in the Ottoman capital. In Syria or Egypt, the plague season often started earlier as a result of moderate temperatures.29 For this reason, Taşköprizade had to adapt that knowledge to local seasonal circumstances. As seen in these examples, the Ottoman treatise writers sought to establish a relationship between different pools of etiological explanations and tried to adjust them to the local conditions of sixteenth-century Istanbul, which was not only the center of learning where they produced their work and from which they drew their observations, but at the same time, this was where the primary audience for these works resided: members of the Ottoman central administration, scholars, and other treatise writers. Hence, these local conditions mattered not only for the production of vernacularized knowledge but also for its consumption. After all, it was the very same body of knowledge that informed Ottoman administrators and the public health measures they implemented. Discussions of Recommended Methods of Treatment In conjunction with new interpretations of plague’s etiology and epidemiology, a distinct set of knowledge on prevention and treatment surfaced in the sixteenth-century Ottoman plague tracts. Unlike the mixture of methods recommended in earlier texts involving a variety of illnesses and other conditions (such as drowning in water or being struck by lightning), the sixteenth-century treatises demonstrate that plague started to acquire its own set of prophylactic and therapeutic measures. In general terms, the sixteenth-century tracts favored prophylactic methods, as prevention was understood to be more important than treatment, yet they included recommendations for a host of methods for treatment, ranging from simple

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herbal recipes to more complex pharmaceuticals, such as theriacs (tiryak-ı faruk or tiryak-ı kebir), terra sigillata or Lemnian earth (tin-i mahtum),30 bezoar stone, balsam, and some fragrant oils that were much sought-after substances in the late sixteenth century. Even though some of these substances seem to appear in many plague treatises almost as generic recommendations, it may be important to consider their availability in different local contexts. Most of these substances or pharmaceuticals were costly and probably not easy to acquire for the majority of the Ottoman population. Sources refer to their limited availability and circulation as well as their acquisition through a network of individual contacts.31 Especially significant was the mention of pharmaceutical substances such as terra sigillata because it was indeed local. Even though its extraction from the island of Limnos—an island in the Aegean that was brought under Ottoman control in the fifteenth century—was very rigidly regimented, it was nevertheless locally available. Hence, the pharmaceutical substances and methods of treatment recommended in the plague treatises might also be indicative of a transition in which discussions of prophylaxis and treatment moved toward the use of vernacular substances. Discussions of Vernacularity in Medical Knowledge It is important to note that early modern Ottoman medical scholars were cognizant of the importance of individual temperaments and the necessity of taking it into consideration in treatment. It was generally agreed that the temperament of individuals varied depending on where they lived, their lifestyle, gender, and age. This made it necessary to prepare individualized drugs for every patient, taking their differences into account. In line with this understanding, it was important to factor in the varying degrees of potency of pharmaceuticals in preparing drugs in order to adjust them to the different needs of individual temperaments. Ottoman medical treatises discussed why certain medical recipes had to be adapted to the temperaments of patients, assessing factors like the age and sex of the patient and the geography in which they lived, as well as the properties of pharmaceutical ingredients. There was a special emphasis on how certain medicinal plants had varying degrees of effect depending on the region in which they grew.32 The renowned seventeenth-century Ottoman physician Emir Çelebi cautioned his readers in his Enmūzecü’t-tıb about relying uncritically on the classical works of Islamic medicine. He noted that the authors of earlier

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medical books wrote their works for the people in their climes. He claimed that his book (Enmūzecü’t-tıb) was best suited to the needs of his contemporary audience. For example, in his discussion of scammony (Convolvulus scammonia)—a bindweed native to the eastern Mediterranean,33 he points out that the plant mentioned by Ibn Sīnā (d. 1037) was not the same as the one that grew in the Ottoman domains. He further suggests that even within the Ottoman lands, there were different types of the plant; the scammony that grew in Antioch was not the same as the one in Istanbul or in Egypt. For this reason, he argues that he effects of the plant would be different. According to Emir Çelebi, Ibn Sīnā recommended adding five drachms of scammony in preparing a drug because he had in mind the species that grew in Basra. Hence he criticizes the physicians who apply the recipes of Ibn Sīnā verbatim, without factoring in local conditions. He notes that the scammony used in Istanbul comes from Antioch and is much more potent, and that two units would be enough for preparing drugs for the people of Istanbul.34 He emphasizes that the physician’s task is to adjust the dosage and administer the drug according to individual differences between patients and that a skilled physician always prepares individualized drugs. Making this recommendation, he was fully aware that both the medical substances and the needs of patients differed in different local contexts. Conclusion The highly adaptable nature of plague to local conditions resulted in the manifestation of epidemics in varying forms, patterns, and seasonality. From the time of its initial introduction to the Ottoman regions during the Black Death to the sixteenth century, the epidemiological character of the plague took its distinct form in line with the climatic, ecological, and social conditions of the Ottoman Empire. It was this localized manifestation of the disease that informed scholarly discussions of its causes, cycles, and effects, as well as its prevention and treatment. A close reading of early modern Ottoman plague treatises suggests that knowledge about the disease, its etiology and epidemiology, and prophylaxis and therapeutics heavily borrowed from earlier Arabic tracts, yet carefully modified the observations drawn from other local contexts to fit the Ottoman experience of plague. Ottoman tract writers wrote to address specifically their own plagues, with the protection and treatment of the Ottoman people in mind. By the sixteenth century, both the disease and knowledge about it had thus

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become localized and vernacularized. These processes were in turn shaped by larger imperial structures and transformations. The empire’s rapid territorial growth and the subsequent forging of trade and communication networks to connect the newly conquered regions transformed the epidemiological character of plague in unprecedented ways; plague became an endemic problem in Ottoman cities by the sixteenth century. But perhaps more important, knowledge about the disease was likewise shaped by the imperial turn in the sixteenth century. The emergence, proliferation, and centralization of the Ottoman scholarly elite, increased scholarly output, and the rise of Istanbul as a center of learning characterized the sixteenth century. It was precisely this new imperial, urban context of scholarship that reinforced the production of a distinct, localized knowledge about the plague that was drawn particularly from the Ottoman experience and written for the consumption of the Ottomans. While the tract writers remained cognizant of the “universal” knowledge of plague, they deliberately rendered it “local.”

Chapter 11 Transposing Knowledge Beyond Translation in the Medieval Islamic and Japanese Medical Literary Traditions M. A. Mujeeb Khan

In the English language, “translate” has many meanings, chief among which we find the notion of transferring information from one language into another. Translate also has the broader meaning of moving something from one place to another. In the history of medicine, translation has almost exclusively identified the transposition of knowledge from one language to another, often accompanying its cultural transposition between civilizations.1 Besides these more recognizable forms of translation in language and movement, other discussions exist that address different forms of translation, especially trends in the translation of terminology and ideas.2 This chapter, however, instead considers the phenomenon of transposition. Transposition is observable in translation summaries and other treatises.3 But transposition within the same language, or tradition, conveys valuable information about the transmission of knowledge within a tradition, that is, in the development of a local literary tradition. This transposition of knowledge has been documented in many traditions and is visible in the earliest developments of intellectual literary traditions. While this transposition and reworking of older knowledge has been shown to be a natural result of transmission, texts also played an important 191

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role in the conceptualization, perpetuation, and transmission of medical knowledge. For this reason, this chapter is an introductory discussion of this perpetuation of knowledge.4 It considers encyclopedism in the preservation of early medical knowledge and how the transposition developing from this intentional act of preservation shaped divergent medical literary traditions that had been derivatively formed based on the traditions they hoped to preserve. Its focus is on the diversification of contents in the medical literary tradition as a natural consequence of encyclopedism. By investigating the table of contents of different works in a tradition, it is possible to discern the change in emphasis seen in treatises over a period of time. In order to explore these changes, this chapter employs two case studies of derivative medical traditions, that is, medieval cultures that were able to appropriate mature, foreign medical literary traditions in their entirety. The two traditions considered are the Japanese tradition, inheritor of the Sino-Korean medical literary tradition, and the Islamic tradition, inheritor of the Greco-Roman medical literary tradition.5 In particular, to construct a meaningful comparison, this chapter takes as its examples the works of tenth-century writers Abū Bakr al-Rāzī’s al-Kitāb al-ḥāwī fī al-ṭibb (abbr. al-Ḥāwī) in the Islamic world and Tanba no Yasuyori’s 丹波康頼 Ishinpō 醫心方 in Japan.6 Both al-Rāzī’s and Yasuyori’s encyclopedias influenced subsequent writers in their respective medical literary traditions in form and content, with each having facilitated the production of new knowledge through transposition. However, until the fourteenth century, Ishinpō was followed only by shorter reformulations and redactions whereas after al-Ḥāwī writers continued to compose both encyclopedic works as well as smaller, topical treatises.7 Through a study of these works, it is possible to trace the structural impact these encyclopedias of al-Rāzī and Yasuyori held over subsequent medical literature, which led to two different results, one of redesigning encyclopedias and the other of only creating alternative treatises.8 In other words, the interests of writers following al-Rāzī in the Islamic world and those after Yasuyori in Japan between the tenth and thirteenth centuries were fundamentally different. Therefore, this chapter addresses the question of how each tradition formed and traces the historical background to al-Rāzī’s and Yasuyori’s encyclopedias, using each as a case study of its respective literary tradition to investigate the development of medical literature following the works of each medical writer. The comparative focus is on the divergent nature

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of these developments and identifies how these should be contextualized within the larger field of medical literary history.9 Background: Local and Foreign Japan’s interaction with the continent stands in sharp contrast to the situation seen in the Islamic world: a sea separated Japan from its neighboring cultures, whereas the expanding Islamic world covered regions whose local traditions helped facilitate the development of a medical literary tradition in Arabic. The point here is to emphasize the traditions themselves, since the participants in the Islamic tradition, especially early on, included Arabs, Assyrians, and Persians as well as Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others. However, all of them operated under the umbrella of the Islamic tradition. Japan, on the other hand, interacted with a living continental tradition, but these large-scale, official interactions ceased about a century before Yasuyori compiled Ishinpō. The presence in Japan of the medical texts that Yasuyori excerpts is largely substantiated by the late ninth-century catalogue of works composed by Fujiwara no Sukeyo 藤原佐世.10 That is, the Song-period (960–1279) standardizations of medical literature occurred after Yasuyori’s compilation of Ishinpō and, therefore, at the time of its compilation, Yasuyori was working with a medical literary tradition in which active contact with the continent was at best through commercial or other means.11 It might be a simplistic generalization, but both al-Rāzī and Yasuyori were working with unchanging inherited medical literary traditions; this reality contrasts the fact that their organization of this knowledge was a dynamic contribution to their own respective traditions. In the case of Yasuyori, this was perhaps even the start of a local Japanese medical literary tradition based on continental medical literary works, whereas al-Rāzī’s contribution was within a local living tradition.12 Therefore, each author played an important role in the organization of knowledge as their collations of medical knowledge involved the inclusion of actual excerpts or the reworking of statements by their predecessors into these encyclopedias. Al-Rāzī’s al-Ḥāwī continues to be a work of great import in the Islamic medical literary tradition, while Yasuyori’s Ishinpō holds a similarly high academic value in studies of the Japanese medical literary tradition. Nevertheless, both texts remain almost completely untreated critically in academic scholarship. Al-Ḥāwī initially faced limited circulation due to its size and cost.13 Ishinpō was constructed as a work submitted to court and held as a private Tanba-family work by Yasuyori’s descendants.14 Despite limited

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popular circulation, both were explicitly cited in later works. The influence of these texts can be interpreted on three levels: within their own tradition, over foreign traditions, and as a repository of earlier medical knowledge. This chapter investigates only the first aspect and uses the nature of each text as a repository to trace its transposition of knowledge and the influence of each over subsequent works within their respective tradition. To accomplish this, the essay breaks the study into two parts: case studies and a comparative study. How did al-Rāzī and Yasuyori organize their texts? Each case study examines the compilations and collative methodologies of al-Rāzī and Yasuyori, respectively. The case studies then analyze these tenth-century encyclopedic formulations of al-Rāzī and Yasuyori alongside their intellectual successors—including early writers such as al-Majūsī, Ibn Sīnā, and Ibn ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī in the Islamic world and Tanba no Masatada 丹波雅忠 and Koremune Tomotoshi 惟宗具俊 in Japan.15 Case Study 1: Islamic World In the case of the Islamic world, Ibn Sīnā’s eleventh-century al-Qānūn fī alṭibb (abbr. al-Qānūn) eventually became a standard work of study, whose dominance led to derivatives and smaller compositions but no further remarkable encyclopedias.16 Al-Qānūn represents the perceived mastery of a genre, and it includes references but not extensive direct quotations like al-Rāzī’s Ḥāwī.17 However, as early as al-Majūsī in the tenth century, explicit references to al-Rāzī’s Ḥāwī are found. This essay traces how al-Rāzī’s organization of knowledge and quotations played a role in the creation and development of these works. Abū Bakr al-Rāzī authored numerous works, including a commentary on Hippocratic aphorisms, a work criticizing Galenic medical philosophy, and a synopsis of medicine. His synopsis is called al-Kitāb al-manṣūrī fī al-ṭibb and was dedicated to a ruler on the principles of medicine.18 In both medieval and modern historiography, there is uncertainty over one encyclopedia of al-Rāzī, titled al-Jāmīʿ al-kabīr, a treatise that exists only in name, referenced by al-Rāzī in his other works.19 However, recently Emilie Savage-Smith has convincingly argued that this work is in fact another name for al-Ḥāwī.20 Al-Ḥāwī’s major feature is its excerpting of earlier medical writers in a fashion similar to Thābit ibn Qurra’s Kitāb al-dhakhīra fī ʿilm al-ṭibb (abbr. al-Dhakhīra).21 Al-Rāzī extensively cites previous medical literature topically throughout the work and organizes the sections himself. In addition

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Table 11.1. Topical Outline of al-Majūsī’s Kāmil. Discourse Topics Part I 1.a

Introduction

1.b

Definitions, Temperaments, and so on

2

Organs

4

Other Technical Matters (faculties, spirits, etc.)

5

Non-naturals

6

Nosology

7

Diagnostic Tools (pulse, urine, etc.)

8–10

Diagnosis

Part II: On Practice 1

Introduction to Drugs

2

Treatment of Disease by Simple Drugs

3

Treatment of Fevers

4–8

Treatment of Disease and Conditions Appearing in Various Areas (including deficiencies of organs, etc.)

9

Surgical Treatment (injuries, bone-setting, etc.)

10

Compound Drug Treatments

Source: A summary of the contents of al-Majūsī’s Kāmil, based on the text and table of contents of a fifteenth-century manuscript held by Yale University’s Historical Medical Library (Cushing Arabic Ms. 4).

to extensive quotation, al-Rāzī includes his own opinion and comments on those of others throughout the work. Even so, it is often difficult to discern which opinion is his and which is an opinion being expressed by an author within a quotation.22 Besides these features, al-Rāzī organizes his text topologically by beginning his first set of discussions with those relating to the head. This topological organization is seen earlier in Thābit’s design of al-Dhakhīra’s chapters 8 through 16, which delineate diseases of the body in the same way. Thābit’s text, while considerably shorter, incorporates a wide range of medical topics. Al-Rāzī, however, considers aspects related to illness. In other words, al-Rāzī’s Ḥāwī covers only disease, including principles of medicine and medical practice only when relevant, a fact for which al-Majūsī later criticizes al-Rāzī’s Ḥāwī but praises his Manṣūrī.23

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Table 11.2. Topical Outline of Ibn Sīnā’s Qānūn. [Book 1: Universal Principles of Medical Knowledge] 1. Definition of medicine and the natural matters a. Temperaments, humors, spirits, etc. b. Anatomy (organs, etc.) 2. Lack of health a. Etiology (non-naturals, external factors) 3. Identification of disease a. Semiotics (signs of disease, etc.) b. Diagnosis (pulse, urine, etc.) [Book 2: Simple Drugs] 1. Principles 2. Properties of Drugs [Book 3: Diseases Related to Parts of the Body] —listed in descending order from the head— [Book 4] 1. Diseases unrelated to a specific body part 2. Surgery (injuries, fractures, etc.) 3. Poisons 4. Aesthetic Issues [Book 5: Compound Drugs] 1. Formularies Source: Based on the text and table of contents of the Bulāq edition of the Qānūn.

Al-Majūsī’s Kitāb kāmil al-ṣināʿa al-ṭibbīya (abbr. Kāmil) resembles alRāzī’s Manṣūrī in that it covers all aspects of medicine.24 Its title conveys al-Majūsī’s intention to compose a work on medical practice, which is also noted in the text’s introduction.25 Moreover, rather than using quotations, al-Majūsī chooses to summarize medical ideas in his own words. As table 11.1 shows, the structure of al-Majūsī’s work is only clinically oriented for the student but not as a comprehensive reference. Al-Majūsī’s organization is fundamentally a guide to medicine in its theoretical and practical forms. However, this organization represents an adaptation of the comprehensiveness of al-Rāzī to didactic encyclopedism like al-Rāzī’s Manṣūrī, a style of writing in which medical knowledge is organized for the sake of ease of learning and which contrasts with practicable encyclopedism.26 Ibn Sīnā’s Qānūn similarly resembles al-Rāzī’s Manṣūrī and not alḤāwī. He was conscious of his predecessors as he occasionally refers to

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them in his Qānūn, including al-Rāzī. Ibn Sīnā’s Qānūn was different from what al-Rāzī had conceptualized with his Ḥāwī. Like al-Majūsī, Ibn Sīnā was focused on the organization of all knowledge and not just the practical variety. Even so, a simple outline of the content of al-Qānūn (table 11.2), a work spanning five books, demonstrates how Ibn Sīnā follows an organizational approach different also from what is found in al-Majūsī’s Kāmil. Ibn Sīnā chose to include theoretical information at the beginning of al-Qānūn, followed by a discussion of diagnosis and semiotics, organs, and nosology. While in content much of his work resembles the construction of al-Majūsī, Ibn Sīnā rearranges how he discusses treatment, including the section on diseases of organs with those unrelated to a particular organ. His similarity with al-Majūsī is best observed in that both attempted to create a comprehensive encyclopedia, but unlike al-Rāzī’s al-Ḥāwī, theirs did not include clinical references to actual case histories of patients.27 In spite of al-Qānūn’s clear dependence on earlier works of the Islamic medical literary tradition, Ibn Sīnā’s medical treatises eventually eclipsed their predecessors in the Islamic world, gaining popularity even in medieval and early modern Europe. It is only after Ibn Sīnā’s Qānūn that encyclopedism as a form of medical literature was replaced by a shift toward smaller treatises and the rise of an exegetical tradition founded on commentaries, though both trends had been present earlier.28 The thirteenth century presents two examples of this shift in focus, in the work of ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī and Ibn al-Nafīs.29 The Damascene al-Baghdādī authored numerous medical texts, including works that cited earlier authorities.30 However, his works were limited to topical texts that included a text on advice to physicians. On the other hand, Ibn al-Nafīs is one of the more recognizable commentators of Ibn Sīnā in that his criticism of Ibn Sīnā’s use of the Galenic model of pulmonary circulation has brought him to prominence in contemporary historiography.31 However, like the Andalusian philosopher and physician Ibn Rushd before him, he also authored a commentary of al-Qānūn.32 While Ibn al-Nafīs authored works like al-Mūjaz fī al-ṭibb (Synopsis of medicine), he did not complete his intended massive encyclopedia.33 In this way, the encyclopedism of al-Rāzī’s Ḥāwī and earlier pandects continued through Ibn Sīnā and even Ibn al-Nafīs, but it was the former’s Qānūn that became a text whose content and structure came to symbolize the standard in advanced didactic medical texts. These different historical and cultural aspects provide insights into the place of encyclopedias in

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the Islamic medical literary tradition. The waning of encyclopedic writing represents a new historical trend toward shorter or exegetical treatises following the Qānūn while the existence of cultural trends in writing reveals the need to contextualize these encyclopedias with the other forms of medical literature available. In the case of al-Rāzī, who had also written synopses and introductory treatises, his Ḥāwī represents a monumental accomplishment as a reference work that practicing physicians could use to find alternative treatments. In contrast, immediately following al-Rāzī in the Islamic medical literary tradition the trend was toward didactic encyclopedeism, producing a different type of encyclopedia, one for teachers and students. The division between practicable and didactic knowledge is often blurred and at times nonexistent, but impracticable knowledge is easily identified.34 The flourishing of commentaries and supercommentaries in the Islamic medical literary tradition following the canonization of Ibn Sīnā’s Qānūn reveals two aspects of al-Rāzī’s work: its importance as an encyclopedia and its influence among later writers as a key work that facilitated these developments. In Japan, however, the rise of encyclopedism was not a development within an international tradition, but the start of its local medical literary tradition. Case Study 2: Japan In 984, Tanba no Yasuyori submitted his medical compilation Ishinpō to the Heian court. Nominally, the work was a part of the fangshu 方書 (Jp. hōsho) genre that had developed earlier on the continent.35 This meant that Ishinpō, in the title, appears to have been envisaged to be a part of this tradition.36 The legacy of Ishinpō in Japan was of literary authority, not in Ishinpō as an explicit source but as an influential standard that later Japanese writers frequently used. Continental writers in early medieval China, in particular those of the Sui dynasty, began a genre of encyclopedic writing, called leishu 類書 (Jp. ruisho), which coincided with the rise of the fangshu genre in medicine. Thus, Yasuyori had various predecessors, in both the size, content, and style of his work.37 As an encyclopedia, Ishinpō was the first medical work of its kind in early Japan.38 Yasuyori compiled the text almost exclusively with quotations from earlier continental medical literature. His organization of the text provides insights into its originality, but Yasuyori clearly employed an encyclopedic style. Like its continental predecessors, Ishinpō contains

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a copious amount of information on topics including medical ethics, acupuncture and moxibustion, disease, external injury, and life cultivation. Yasuyori’s organization of this text might be classified as wholly derivative if considered in light of its continental predecessors. But it is in fact unique as has been shown elsewhere.39 However, the effect of this compilation on later Japanese medical literature was not further encyclopedism but rather a shift toward topical and smaller treatises. Yasuyori’s great-grandson, Tanba no Masatada, is the earliest known writer clearly following the collative style of Ishinpō. Masatada’s work, Iryakushō 医略抄, is a one-volume redaction of Ishinpō focusing on prescriptions.40 In Iryakushō’s introduction, Masatada states that his motivation was to compile a group of effective, tested prescriptions.41 At first glance, Iryakushō appears to have been compiled by quoting earlier medical works. However, Iryakushō’s content reveals its relationship to its predecessor. The excerpted passages found in Iryakushō can also be found in the same order in the corresponding Ishinpō sections where Masatada selectively picks from what Yasuyori included in Ishinpō. Therefore, Iryakushō’s quotation of earlier continental works is only its quotation of Ishinpō as Masatada takes Ishinpō as a source for medical prescriptions in his redaction and follows its organizational style.42 Despite this, structurally, the two works are quite different. Masatada’s use of Yasuyori’s compilation for composing his text conveys an impression of similarity, but, in fact, as its introduction notes, it is a collection of prescriptions. In comparison to Yasuyori’s comprehensive text on medicine, Masatada’s fails to provide any measure of comprehensiveness, which is precisely the point of Masatada’s compilation. In fifty-two chapters, Iryakushō does follow Ishinpō’s style and topics, but only as a guide. For example, on wind disease, to which volume 3 of Ishinpō is devoted, Yasuyori had included twenty-five chapters with one on generic wind disease and twenty-three on specific ailments. In contrast, Masatada selected five of these topics, including only a few recipes from each of the corresponding Ishinpō chapters.43 This corroborates Masatada’s statement in his introduction and demonstrates how these two texts, while undeniably related, diverged in intent and content. These differences show that Masatada’s Iryakushō was not constructed as an encyclopedia. Later works, such as Tanba no Yukinaga’s 丹波行長 Kanen yōshō 遐年 要鈔 were also composed of quotations.44 As its title suggests, Kanen yōshō was composed by Yukinaga as a topical work addressing matters of senescence, including principles of drug therapy and relevant prescriptions for

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old age, but was not a redaction of Ishinpō. On the other hand, his contemporary Koremune Tomotoshi’s Idanshō 医談抄 is a discussion of medical practice and one conducted in the vernacular.45 Tomotoshi also employs excerpts from earlier medical works but the main content of his work is a discussion of medical principles. Ishinpō is included among the works discussed by Tomotoshi in Idanshō. Idanshō demonstrates that, by the end of the thirteenth century, Ishinpō continued to play an important role in the Japanese medical literary tradition. In addition, both authors included excerpts from Song-period texts.46 It is only in the following century that encyclopedism would reappear in Japan. Its reappearance, however, does not represent a waning in the influence of Ishinpō, but rather a consequence of Song-dynasty developments in China having entered Japan; their initial influence can be seen in Tomotoshi’s work.47 Kajiwara Shōzen 梶原性全 composed two works on medicine, Man’anpō 万安方 and Ton’ishō 頓医抄.48 Shōzen wrote Man’anpō in Sinitic but his work is the first known medical treatise to contain explicit criticism of earlier treatises.49 Perhaps due to his Buddhist heritage, Shōzen composed Ton’ishō in the vernacular and as a work for the average physician. In other words, it was not compiled as a work for the medical bureaucracy like the works of earlier writers, such as Yasuyori, Masatada, Yukinaga, and Tomotoshi, who were all, in some way, affiliated with the medical bureaucracy.50 Japan’s medical bureaucracy was modeled on the Sui- and Tang-period bureaucracies seen on the continent with Erudites of Acupuncture (hari hakase 鍼博士), Medicine (i hakase 醫博士), Therapeutic Massage (anma hakase 按摩博士), and so on.51 A survey of these medical literary works demonstrates that Yasuyori’s Ishinpō, which marked the first medical encyclopedic work in Japan, clearly held influence over later works in the Japanese medical literary tradition. However, until Shōzen, there were no other comprehensive medical encyclopedias. Moreover, in addition to medicine in the form of prescriptions and medical theory, another genre of medicine from the continent called bencao 本草 (Jp. honzō), often translated as materia medica, also existed and flourished. Various aspects of bencao were included in Ishinpō, including a list of Japanese drug names found in the continental medical literary tradition.52 However, both Iryakushō and Kanen yōshō ignore this, and Idanshō represents a completely different style of inquiry into medicine. Ishinpō and subsequent works in the Japanese medical literary tradition were all the direct result of Japan’s medical bureaucracy and that of the Heian period in particular. For this reason, Shōzen’s encyclopedia in

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the fourteenth century was a new development whose origins were in the arrival of Song-dynasty works from the continent and Shōzen’s intellectual involvement in temple activities. This involvement in official court activities resembles the start of the translation movement in the Islamic world, but continuous sponsorship or support from a central, or single, government was not a facet of the Islamic medical literary tradition. However, the rise of encyclopedism in the Islamic world with al-Rāzī and its rise in Japan with Yasuyori represent developments in the tenth century that led to very different situations in the thirteenth century. What were these differences and, perhaps more important, how should they be understood? Convergence in Difference These encyclopedias were created through a transposition of knowledge accomplished by an extensive excerpting of earlier writers. However, the legacy of each work was different, with transposition eventually resulting in the creation of new works by later writers. The style of these new works initially differed; the most glaring difference between the Islamic and Japanese medical literary traditions is how each reached a decline in encyclopedism by the thirteenth century. In Japan, Yasuyori’s encyclopedia was a standard work in the medical bureaucracy leading to subsequent works that were redactions or topical texts. On the other hand, al-Rāzī’s encyclopedia, which itself followed earlier Islamic encyclopedists, led to further encyclopedism for another century by later writers until Ibn Sīnā, whose medical encyclopedia became the standard in the Islamic world. Thus, medical literature after Ibn Sīnā followed a trend similar to what occurred in Japan after Ishinpō. It is worthwhile to note how the sociological differences of each tradition laid the foundation for the differences that would develop in how transpositions of knowledge shaped the creation of new medical literature. Medical literature was popularized in the Islamic world early on; in fact, while the translation movement was commissioned by the Abbasid court, most nontranslated works were presented separately to individual leaders rather than to the court or any particular government.53 These works were also circulated widely and became available to practicing physicians soon thereafter.54 In contrast, the development of the Japanese medical literary tradition was in Japan’s medical bureaucracy.55 Ishinpō was kept as a work of the bureaucracy and later works, even derivative practical works like Iryakushō, were produced within this context. It appears that it was not

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until Japan’s medieval period, the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, that Ishinpō received a wider circulation.56 It is difficult to identify which tradition was more practical and therefore more appropriate to state that the developments observable in each medical literary tradition provided what was needed at anytime for each tradition.57 Al-Rāzī’s Ḥāwī was more important as a repository of medical knowledge than as one of medical opinions of others, whereas Yasuyori’s Ishinpō was taken as a repository of medical knowledge precisely because of its inclusion of earlier medical opinions in the form of quotations from other texts. The differences in these interpretations of practicality can be attributed to the circulation of these texts and the social situations within which the medical literary traditions developed. In their constitution, however, another discernible difference presents itself. Medical works in Japan continued to use quotations from earlier medical works and thereby continued in a process of transposing knowledge through excerption. That is, while this transposition continued in the Islamic world through the transposition of content, quotations were largely excluded as a form of text from medical literature following al-Rāzī as compositions emphasized accessibility.58 The transposition of knowledge continued in both traditions, but did so in different forms as excerpts played an important role in the Japanese medical literary tradition and continued to form the basis of their works, whereas, in the Islamic tradition, quotations lost much of their role as writers preferred the transposition of knowledge without extensively employing excerpts. These differences demonstrate how these two traditions produced different examples of pluralism and multiplicity in their production of knowledge following earlier encyclopedic textual medicine.59 In the Islamic world, authors continued to manipulate knowledge by transposition through Ibn Sīnā. Although historiography has tied these writers to a tradition called Galenic medicine, such notation moves the analysis of medical literature from its structure or use of earlier material to how earlier material played a role in the medical works of the Islamic world. The nuance is slight, but the difference is vital. For example, in the latter, the importance in the use and disuse of Hippocrates or Galen in the Islamic world is less relevant than how they were used. In al-Rāzī’s encyclopedia, they are included among other writers along with al-Rāzī’s own opinions, resulting in a compilation of medical knowledge from its earliest origins up through al-Rāzī himself. Al-Majūsī’s and Ibn Sīnā’s encyclopedias relied much less on direct quotation, but they did use the medical

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knowledge of their predecessors and often followed their medical opinions. It is precisely through this use of medical knowledge that the transposition of earlier knowledge in the Islamic medical literary tradition is observable. The structural and organizational changes in these encyclopedias led to Ibn Sīnā’s work. Encyclopedism in the likeness of these lengthy and comprehensive works largely abated after Ibn Sīnā’s work, when commentaries and shorter works dominated. Even so, as with al-Rāzī’s Ḥāwī, each work was not only nominally new but also an example of a new method of organization. Works after al-Rāzī, such as commentaries and topical works, show that literary diversity was a driving force in the creation of new medical encyclopedias between the tenth and thirteenth centuries. In Japan, the epistemological focus of medical knowledge was not the perpetuation or reformulation of encyclopedias to create similar but reorganized texts; rather, the texts following Ishinpō continued to use quotation. More to the point, these quotations were a product of the adherence of later works to Ishinpō’s excerpting style. Iryakushō was a redaction of Ishinpō, and subsequent works, owing to the influence of Song-dynasty works, included quotations from texts not cited by Yasuyori in Ishinpō. Even so, like the term Galenic medicine for the Islamic medical literary tradition, Chinese medicine has similarly been used to denote the Japanese medical literary tradition.60 Also like its Islamic counterpart, the transposition of continental medical knowledge was not a passive Japanese adherence, and, as Yasuyori’s own transposition of knowledge demonstrates, each instance of transposition of knowledge in the Japanese medical literary tradition denotes each respective author’s commitments to and stances on medical knowledge. Here the Japanese tradition’s distinguishing feature is that later medical literature in Japan, undeniably bureaucratic at its start, did not attempt to replace Ishinpō but transposed the knowledge within Ishinpō through topical selection and redaction. Therefore, while Ishinpō is Japan’s earliest known medical encyclopedia and its earliest extant medical work, subsequent writers saw no need to replace it. For this reason, Japanese writers through the thirteenth century paid heed to the literary authority of Ishinpō and created derivative works. In this way, medical writers of each civilization employed transposition for the purposes of restructuring their texts to represent their own medical positions. It is therefore reasonable to state that this intention to present their conceptualizations of medicine, shared by writers of both civilizations, led to divergent developments in each medical literary tradition, changes that were, in intentionality, the same: purposed reconstructions

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of knowledge to serve a particular need, social or personal, in the medical literary tradition. Moreover, these developments reflect how writers in both traditions grappled with their own medical literary tradition while negotiating the need for new medical literature. Conclusion This essay began with a discussion of transposition and it is worthwhile to return to this idea. The Islamic world and Japan both began their medical encyclopedic traditions with works that transposed the opinions and knowledge of their predecessors. This essay has shown that the rise of encyclopedism or lack thereof after al-Rāzī and Yasuyori was less relevant than the fact that the changes seen in medical literature were the result of how to negotiate al-Ḥāwī and Ishinpō. Although their styles were different, with the Islamic world’s approach of literary diversity within encyclopedism and Japan’s literary authority in the context of new textual forms, both civilizations equally engaged what were two massive encyclopedias composed of excerpts. However, Japan’s continued relationship with the continent led to an influx of new texts, a process that the Islamic world did not see until much later in the form of Latin-to-Arabic translations after the revival of medical literature in late medieval Europe.61 More to the point, after the thirteenth century, while both medical literary traditions continued to produce new works, there were significant changes in methodology. Commentary had already been a popular form of writing in the Islamic world and it would dominate its postclassical period, whereas written commentaries did not develop as a form of medical literature in Japan during this period.62 In spite of these divergent trends in writing and differing relationships with neighboring cultures, topical texts were developed more numerously in both civilizations after this era of encyclopedism, with redactions, specialized texts, and synopses dominating. This latter aspect is a more universal trait of medical literary traditions that stands in contrast to the salient differences between both traditions. Even so, with great differences in geographical size, cultural pluralism, and cultural production among their neighbors, the existence of similarities demonstrates a common goal of medical writers of the medieval period to digest large amounts of information in an understandable and practical form. In fact, the largely divergent approaches to post-Rāzī and post-Yasuyori texts represent exactly this: attempts by later writers to produce intelligible but useful works. Al-Rāzī’s

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and Yasuyori’s encyclopedias led to new medical literature, whose differences were discernible both in content and in their appropriation of the two. Beyond the influence of transposition through al-Rāzī and Yasuyori, however, remains the broader question of how form shaped and continues to shape our understanding of knowledge. The Islamic and Japanese medical literary traditions are the first known historical examples of geographically disconnected civilizations inheriting and appropriating earlier textualized medical traditions, that is, medical literary traditions. Recent research in Islamic intellectual culture has shown the importance of the commentary tradition in intellectual production,63 but many more specific questions remain to be answered. One such question is how the developments in encyclopedism between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, including its decline, fit into each tradition’s shift into the early modern world, a period of greater and sustained intercivilizational exchange. Strict periodic divisions can lead to a study of medical history that has overlooked connections and developments in these medical literary traditions that were not affected in the same way as state polities in, for example, the rise of the Ottoman state in the Islamic world and the Tokugawa shogunate in Japan. The early modern’s link to recent history often obfuscates the place of the medieval world that facilitated its development.64

Part IV Charting the Skies

Chapter 12 The Nesting Hypothesis for Planetary Distances and Its Persistence over the Centuries and across Cultures Bernard R. Goldstein and Giora Hon

The nesting hypothesis for planetary distances was first presented in the second century CE by Ptolemy in his Planetary Hypotheses. It was remarkably successful in many different cultural environments and was highly attractive to a great many scholars over the centuries, some of whom made significant modifications while keeping to the general structure. In this chapter we restrict our attention to the time period ending in 1600. Kepler’s version of this hypothesis, published in 1596, transformed it from a geocentric system into a heliocentric system, but soon thereafter the nesting hypothesis was abandoned altogether. The success of this hypothesis rested largely on numerical agreement between planetary distances derived from the hypothesis and numerical data ultimately based on astronomical observations. This is a prime example of the perils of numerical agreement in establishing the truth of a scientific claim. Ptolemy’s Nesting Hypothesis In the Almagest Ptolemy claimed to have determined the minimum and maximum distances of the Moon from the Earth as well as a distance from 209

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the Earth to the Sun, all measured in terrestrial radii. In that treatise he made no claims about the true planetary distances, although their distances in the geometric models did vary with respect to a mean distance of 60 which serves as an arbitrary unit. This changed in his later work, the Planetary Hypotheses, which is only partly preserved in the original Greek. The relevant passages, however, are found in the medieval Arabic translation.1 Ptolemy explicitly made the following assumptions: (1) The order of the planets in a geocentric system is Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the fixed stars, where the position of the Sun is to be demonstrated; (2) There are no gaps between the orbs of adjacent planets;2 (3) The ratio of maximum to minimum distance in the planet’s geometric model presented in the Almagest is the same as the ratio of maximum to minimum distance measured in terrestrial radii; (4) The distances of the Moon and the Sun from the Earth measured in terrestrial radii were correctly determined in the Almagest from parallax and eclipse observations. These distances are independent of the nesting hypothesis. Ptolemy introduced his discussion as follows: The arrangement of the spheres has been a subject of some doubt up to this time. The sphere of the Moon is certainly closer to the Earth than the sphere of Mercury; the sphere of Mercury closer to the Earth than the sphere of Venus; the sphere of Venus closer to the Earth than the sphere of Mars; the sphere of Mars closer than the sphere of Jupiter; the sphere of Jupiter closer than the sphere of Saturn, and the sphere of Saturn closer than the sphere of the fixed stars. But with respect to the Sun, there are three possibilities: either all five planetary spheres lie above the sphere of the Sun just as they all lie above the sphere of the Moon; or they all lie below the sphere of the Sun; or some lie above and some lie below the sphere of the Sun, and we cannot decide [this matter] with any certainty.3

In other words, the question to be decided is the location of the Sun with respect to the planets. Although Ptolemy listed all possibilities, the only ones taken seriously by his successors concern the location of the Sun with respect to Mercury and Venus. Ptolemy noted that if a planet were seen to transit the Sun, it would be demonstrated that it lies below the Sun.

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However, no such transit had been observed and, Ptolemy added, that even if it were to take place, it might not be perceptible because the apparent size of a planet is so much smaller than the apparent size of the Sun.4 Ptolemy began his argument by citing the maximum distance of the Moon in the Almagest, namely 64 terrestrial radii. Applying the ratio of maximum to minimum distance for Mercury (with the assumption that there is no gap), he determined that the maximum distance of Mercury is 166 terrestrial radii. Next, applying the same procedure for Venus, he found its maximum distance to be 1,079 terrestrial radii. But, from the data in the Almagest, the minimum distance of the Sun is 1,160 terrestrial radii—which means that there is a small gap between the orb of Venus and the orb of the Sun, as Ptolemy acknowledged. Ptolemy added that this gap is not sufficiently large to fit another planet between Venus and the Sun, and the problem would be resolved by slightly increasing the maximum distance of the Moon. It is this numerical agreement that justified the nesting hypothesis and that the Sun is above Mercury and Venus. Ptolemy then proceeded to determine the distances of the planets beyond the Sun, and concluded that the distance to the fixed stars is about 20,000 terrestrial radii (see table 12.1). The problem with allowing gaps between planetary orbs is that they are inconsistent with the principle that Nature abhors a vacuum (to use a later formulation) as well as the general principle that there is nothing useless in Nature.5 In other words, Ptolemy did not consider the gaps as having any purpose. As we will see, this issue was addressed in a variety of ways by his successors.6 It is important to note that for the planets the models in the Almagest are strictly geometrical, that is, the five visible planets move on circles and have no physical attributes. By contrast, the Sun and the Moon in the Almagest have physical attributes of size and distance from the Earth, which are essential for the discussion of lunar and solar eclipses. However, in the Planetary Hypotheses Ptolemy converted the geometrical planetary models into physical orbs, and the planets were assigned apparent sizes at mean distance, measured in terrestrial radii. In other words, the expression “Ptolemaic system” refers to the treatment of the planets in Ptolemy’s Planetary Hypotheses and its successors.7 The Medieval Period The system of nested planetary orbs was transmitted to the Islamic world, and it was accepted by a great many Muslim astronomers, sometimes

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Table 12.1. Planetary distances in terrestrial radii (rounded) Planet

Ptolemy

al-Battānī

Minimum Maximum Minimum Maximum Moon

33

64

33

64

Mercury

64

166

64

166

Venus

166

1,079

166

1,070

1,160

1,260

1,070

1,146

Sun Mars

1,260

8,820

1,146

8,022

Jupiter

8,820

14,187

8,022

12,924

Saturn

14,187

19,865

12,924

18,094

Fixed stars

About 20,000

About 19,000

Note: In both sets the ratios of maximum to minimum distances are the same for the Moon, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, whereas these ratios for Venus and the Sun differ slightly. There is no variation in distance for the fixed stars.

with relatively minor changes in the planetary distances. For example, alBattānī (d. 929), one of the leading and most influential astronomers in the Islamic world, presented the nesting hypothesis, modifying Ptolemy’s least distance of the Sun from 1,160 to 1,070 terrestrial radii, which he then set equal to the greatest distance of Venus. Al-Battānī thus eliminated the gap between the orbs of Venus and the Sun, while maintaining the rest of Ptolemy’s nesting hypothesis.8 This solution to the problem with the gaps was attractive to many of al-Battānī’s followers in the Middle Ages (see table 12.1). An Iranian astronomer who addressed the planetary distances was Kūshyār ibn Labbān (early eleventh century). He agreed with al-Battānī that the greatest distance of Venus is equal to the least distance of the Sun and that there are no gaps between the planetary orbs. But he added a new claim, namely, that the greatest distance of Venus—as well as the assumptions of the nesting hypothesis for all the planets—was based on measurements of parallax, that is, the angle subtended by the radius of the Earth at the distance of the planet.9 In fact, no such measurement was possible at the time, for this angle is much too small to have been observed for any of the five planets visible to the naked eye. Indeed, Ptolemy noted in Almagest IX.1 that none of these planets or the fixed stars has a noticeable parallax.10 So here we have a case where belief in the theory is so strong that

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it is assumed to be verified by measurement even in the absence of any such observational data. Also of interest is the discussion of planetary distances by al-cUrḍī (d. 1266). He insisted that while Ptolemy gave a value for the apparent diameter of Venus at mean distance (as a fraction of the solar diameter), he had ignored the variation in its apparent diameter. The consequence of Ptolemy’s distances for Venus on its apparent diameter is that at least distance its apparent diameter would be two-fifths that of the Sun, which, al-cUrḍī noted, is contrary to observation. To eliminate this problem al-cUrḍī changed the order of the planets such that the orb of Venus was entirely above the orb of the Sun, that is, the least distance of Venus was now equal to the greatest distance of the Sun. In all other respects the nesting hypothesis was unchanged. Here we see the appeal to a physical argument to justify modifying the Ptolemaic system without challenging the hypothesis.11 Although there was no translation into Latin of Ptolemy’s Planetary Hypotheses, several key Arabic texts in which the nesting hypothesis is described were translated into Latin, and this tradition continued in medieval Latin treatises that were based on these translations. For example, the treatise by al-Farghānī (fl. 860) was translated into Latin twice in the twelfth century, and the treatise by al-Battānī was also translated into Latin in the same century.12 Later medieval Latin authors such as Campanus of Novara (fl. 1260) and Roger Bacon (d. 1292) depended on these translations in their discussions of the planetary distances.13 Levi ben Gerson (or Gersonides, d. 1344) of Orange (in southern France) was an astronomer of the first rank who brought new perspectives on the Ptolemaic tradition. He cited and, on occasion, quoted the Hebrew translation of Ptolemy’s Planetary Hypotheses.14 Levi’s Astronomy, composed in Hebrew, consists of 136 chapters that fill about 250 folios in manuscript. Most of it was translated into Latin in his lifetime with his assistance.15 An example of Levi’s critical attitude is his disapproval of Ptolemy’s model for Mars. Based on the variation in Mars’s distance from the Earth, the model implies a sixfold variation in apparent size, whereas Levi indicated that it varies by no more than twofold.16 We note that before the invention of the telescope the apparent size of a celestial object was established from its brightness. To the best of our knowledge, Levi was the only astronomer before the sixteenth century to describe a specific observation of the brightness of Mars.17 Moreover, in chapter 56 of his Astronomy Levi determined the eccentricity of the Sun’s orb based on observations of its apparent size near apogee and perigee.18 Ptolemy, however, determined the

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solar eccentricity from data on the length (in days) of the seasons.19 For Levi a successful planetary model had to account for physical data as well as positional data: in this respect Levi’s attitude was most unusual before Kepler. Levi was aware that the order of distances from the Earth to Mercury, Venus, and the Sun was controversial. The difficulty was that the order of the other planets was based on their periods of revolution about the Earth. But for these three celestial objects the period of revolution is the same, namely, one year. Levi considered three different orderings: (1) the hypothesis of Ptolemy that Mercury and Venus are both below the Sun; (2) the hypothesis of al-Biṭrūjī (twelfth century, Spain) that Mercury is below the Sun and Venus above it;20 and (3) the hypothesis of Jābir ibn Aflaḥ (twelfth century, Spain) that Mercury and Venus are both above the Sun.21 Levi’s own view was that it is most likely that Mercury and Venus are above the Sun for, if they were below the Sun, their parallax should be observable. Note that parallax is greater the closer an object is to the Earth. Ptolemy’s value for the solar parallax was three minutes of arc, which, in fact, is much too high. If it were so, planets closer to the Earth would have an even greater parallax—but no such parallax had been observed. Nevertheless, Levi computed a complete set of planetary distances for each hypothesis.22 There is a report by the Andalusian philosopher Ibn Rushd (or Averroes, d. 1198) in an Arabic astronomical text preserved in a medieval Hebrew translation, which would seem to settle the question. In the context of the order of the planets in the Planetary Hypotheses, Averroes commented that two black spots were seen on the Sun by an observer in the eleventh century and, by computation, Averroes found that Mercury and Venus were in conjunction with the Sun at that time (which is not specified).23 Levi was aware of this report, but did not accept the interpretation that the spots were Mercury and Venus; rather, he claimed that the objects seen on the face of the Sun were “meteors,” that is, sublunary objects visible in the sky.24 Levi’s most significant innovation was the insertion of a celestial fluid between the planetary orbs. He was concerned that, without such a fluid, the motion of the concave surface of the lower planet would interfere with the motion of the convex surface of the higher planet (see figure 12.1). This fluid has the property that the motion of each layer diminishes as a function of its distance from the surface of the planet’s orb until a layer is reached where no motion occurs. He then drew an analogy from terrestrial physics, which is most unusual in a medieval astronomical context, for it

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Figure 12.1. A reconstruction of Levi’s argument on the interplanetary fluid, where T is the center of the Earth, Pi is the lower planet and Pi + 1 is the planet immediately above it. The thickness of the fluid is represented on the radius from the Earth as SW and the motionless layer is VV´.

was believed at the time that the sublunary and superlunary domains are subject to different physical rules.25 The strength of the impulse depends upon the strength of the motion. This is clarified from the throwing of stones, for the greater the force, the greater is the amount of the medium that receives the form of the impulse. But when the force is weak, its amount is diminished until it happens, due to the weakness of the impulse that [the stone] will fall immediately upon its separation from the hand of the thrower. . . . It is clearly appropriate that there be enough fluid between the spheres of one planet and the spheres of another such that a motionless layer may remain in its midst to make sure that the motions are not confused.26

Levi then presented an elaborate argument to determine the thickness of these interplanetary fluid layers that maintain the nesting hypothesis in a new way. For Levi, with the hypothesis that the Sun is above both Mercury and Venus, the distance to the fixed stars is about 84,000 terrestrial radii, in contrast to Ptolemy’s value of 20,000 terrestrial radii. But in the case where the Sun is below both Mercury and Venus, the distance to the

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fixed stars is computed to be about 157 × 1012 terrestrial radii, a truly astronomical quantity!27 Levi responded to Ptolemy’s concern that gaps between planetary orbs would be useless by giving the fluid in them the specific purpose of eliminating interference between the motion of a planetary orb and the motion of an adjacent planetary orb.28 In the fifteenth century Regiomontanus (1436–76) was the leading astronomer in Europe. Among his influential works is the Epitome of the Almagest, which was published in 1496. In this treatise he reviewed the nesting hypothesis for the planetary distances, accepting al-Battānī’s value for the least distance of the Sun from the Earth, and referring to the principle that there can be no vacuum in nature.29 Clearly, Regiomontanus preferred al-Battānī’s solar distances over those of Ptolemy because of the absence of gaps between the orbs in the former. Copernicus and His Successors Although there were still proponents of Ptolemy’s nesting hypothesis throughout the sixteenth century, our focus will be on Copernicus and responses to his views on the structure of the universe. But first we present some evidence for the persistence of Ptolemy’s nesting hypothesis: see, for example, figure 12.2, taken from Apianus (1495–1552), Cosmographia. At the center is the body of the Earth, composed of the elements earth and water, and surrounded by the spheres of air and fire (constituting the sublunar domain). The celestial domain begins with the orb of the Moon, followed by the orbs of the other planets up to Saturn in Ptolemy’s order. It is noteworthy that the planetary orbs are all displayed with the same thickness, that is, the distances from the Earth to the planets according to the nesting hypothesis are only represented schematically. Copernicus introduced a heliocentric system where the planetary distances are determined without reference to the nesting hypothesis, but he still displayed a figure which looks very much like the figure in Apianus, with the difference that the Sun is at the center rather than the Earth (see figures 12.3a and 12.3b). The figure in the printed edition is a poor version of the figure in Copernicus’s manuscript, for in the printed version orbs 1 to 4 have labels in the wrong place—above the orb to which they belong: note the “empty” orb above the orb of the Earth and the Moon. As in Apianus, the planetary orbs are not drawn to scale. Despite the display of this figure, Copernicus did not call attention to the fact that his system does not adhere to the nesting principle.30

Figure 12.2. Apianus, Cosmographia (Antwerp: Bellerus [1539] 1584), 6. The same figure appears in the first edition.

a

Figure 12.3. (a) Copernicus, De revolutionibus, Kraków, Jagiellonian Library, MS 10,000, f. 9v. (b) Copernicus, De revolutionibus (Nuremberg: Petreius, 1543), f. 9v.

b

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219

To understand the way planetary distances are determined in the Copernican system we need to consider the equivalence of this system with that of Ptolemy, which depends on “the parallelogram rule,” that is, in modern terms, the commutativity of vector addition. Figures 12.4a and 12.4b show the equivalence of the two systems in the case of an outer planet (Mars, Jupiter, or Saturn) for a model that is somewhat simplified. Figure 12.4a displays a geocentric model where T is the Earth surrounded by a circle called the deferent whose radius is R (set by Ptolemy as 60), on which there rotates an epicycle about point C with radius r. The planet is located at M and, according to Ptolemy, the mean Sun always lies in a direction parallel to CM. Hence the path from the Earth to the planet can be either – – TCM or TSM, for TSMC is a parallelogram. In figure 12.4b the same figure is recast as a heliocentric model, where the path from the Earth to planet is – – – again TSM. Note that S, the mean Sun in figure 12.4a, becomes S, the center of the Earth’s orb, in figure 12.4b, a point at which there is no celestial body. This is definitely not the position of the true Sun, which is at a considerable distance from the mean Sun in Copernicus’s planetary models. For this reason some scholars refer to Copernicus’s system as heliostatic rather than heliocentric. Of special interest is that the radii of the deferent and the epicycle in Ptolemy’s geocentric model become the radii of the planet’s orb and that of the Earth’s orb in Copernicus’s heliocentric model. This means that Copernicus had no flexibility in choosing a value for the radius of the planet’s orb once he fixed the radius of the Earth’s orb as the unit. Indeed, the ratio of the radii of the orbs in Copernicus’s system cannot depart significantly from the ratio of the radii of deferent to epicycle in Ptolemy’s system. A similar argument holds for the inner planets, Mercury and Venus.31 Copernicus considered the Earth–Sun distance as his unit for measuring planetary distances, and today this distance is called the astronomical unit. It is noteworthy that Copernicus’s procedure, which relied on ratios of the radii of deferent to epicycle in the Ptolemaic models, yields very good values for the mean distances of the planets from the Sun, far better from a modern perspective than Ptolemy’s, but Copernicus did not call attention to these values.32 In contrast to the nesting hypothesis, this procedure yields cosmic distances that are correctly determined from astronomical data. It is easy enough to convert Copernicus’s distances in astronomical units into terrestrial radii, once the Earth–Sun distance has been determined. In this matter (as in many others) Copernicus did not rely on any new observations. Rather, he was guided by his desire to avoid straying too

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b

Figure 12.4. (a) A geocentric model for an outer planet. (b) A heliocentric model for an outer planet.

far from Ptolemy’s values for the solar distances. Copernicus’s result was that the maximum solar distance is 1,179 terrestrial radii, a value between al-Battānī’s 1,108 and Ptolemy’s 1,260 terrestrial radii.33 The least and greatest planetary distances derived from Copernicus’s text clearly show the gaps in his heliocentric system, for example, the greatest distance of Mars from the Sun is 1,902 terrestrial radii whereas the least distance of Jupiter is 5,687 terrestrial radii, that is, the gap is 3,785 terrestrial radii. But the most dramatic gap comes between the greatest distance of Saturn and the immense distance to the fixed stars. One of Copernicus’s proudest achievements was his account of retrograde motion of the planets as due to the position of the observer on a moving Earth rotating about the Sun. Since the observer considers his position at rest, the Earth’s motion is transferred to the apparent path of each planet, which, given the ratio of each planet’s velocity about the Sun to the Earth’s velocity about the Sun and the planetary distances from the Sun, yields the retrograde motions that are seen by an observer on Earth. A consequence of this achievement is that the fixed stars would display an annual parallax unless they were at an enormous distance from the Sun (or the

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Earth); since no annual parallax of the fixed stars is perceptible, they must be very far away. In contrast to the parallax considered previously, called horizontal parallax, annual parallax is the angle subtended by the radius of the Earth’s orb as seen from a fixed star (or any other celestial body). There was no such concept in Ptolemaic astronomy. In De revolutionibus, I.10, Copernicus acknowledged the problem, and offered a solution: “Yet none of these phenomena [i.e., annual parallax] appears in the fixed stars. This proves their immense height. . . . From Saturn . . . to the sphere of the fixed stars there is an additional gap of the largest size.” Copernicus then introduced a physical argument to justify this gap: “The twinkling light [of the fixed stars shows] they are distinguished from the planets, for there had to be a very great distance between what moves and what does not move.”34 Evidently, Copernicus was not concerned with the principle that there is nothing useless in Nature. Rheticus (1514–74), Copernicus’s direct disciple, commented on the interplanetary gaps in his Narratio Prima (1540), the first published account of Copernicus’s heliocentric system: “For they are all [the six planetary orbs] so arranged that no immense interval is left between one and another.”35 It seems that the abandonment of the nesting hypothesis was recognized but seen as something of an embarrassment. In our view Copernicus was responding to a well-known debate in the late Middle Ages. At issue was Aristotle’s principle (slightly modified) that the greater the period of a celestial body the farther it is located from the center of motion. This works for the outer planets, but the problem was that the periods of the Sun, Venus, and Mercury are all equal to one year, that is, the principle breaks down for these planets. Copernicus realized that if one shifts the center of motion from the Earth to the Sun, the periods around the Sun for the Earth (which takes the place of the Sun), Venus, and Mercury, are all different, and Aristotle’s principle can be restored (Copernicus’s calculations are defective, but they do not affect the result qualitatively). This argument established a preference for a heliocentric system, and in this system the nesting principle no longer applied.36 In the second half of the sixteenth century there were three competing cosmic systems, the Ptolemaic, the Copernican, and what may be called the inverted Copernican system, namely, the Sun revolves around the Earth and the five planets revolve around the Sun. Among the adherents of the third view was Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), who had a number of objections to the Copernican system. For example, he argued that a consequence of the “immense distance to the fixed stars” is that a star of the third magnitude, whose apparent diameter was assumed to be one minute of arc, would have

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a true diameter that exceeded the size of the Earth’s orb around the Sun, which Brahe regarded as absurd.37 The most serious blow to the nesting hypothesis came in the second half of the sixteenth century. On the basis of observations of comets, “new” stars, and atmospheric refraction, it was concluded that there was no distinction between sublunar and superlunar substances and that comets, which had previously been considered sublunar, were now located above the Moon. Moreover, the planets were not attached to orbs, as previously believed; rather, they moved in some sort of fluid whose nature was disputed.38 As a result, the argument against interplanetary gaps on the basis of their uselessness became meaningless, given the absence of orbs. At this point one might imagine that the nesting hypothesis was completely dead, but this was not the case. Kepler’s Creative Response in 1596 Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) was the foremost astronomer of his time. He was a student of Michael Maestlin (1550–1631) at Tübingen, where he became acquainted with both the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems, as well as recent contributions to astronomy including those by Maestlin. In 1595 Kepler was particularly indebted to Maestlin for clarifying issues of planetary distances in the Copernican system.39 For purposes of this essay we focus on the argument for the nesting hypothesis in a Copernican system described in the first edition of Kepler’s Mysterium cosmographicum (1596) and we ignore his major contributions to astronomy made after 1600.40 In the preface to the first edition of the Mysterium Kepler called attention to the gaps between the orbs in the Copernican system. At first he thought it might be possible to place a new planet in the gap between the orbs of Mars and Jupiter and another planet in the gap between Mercury and Venus: “Yet the interposition of a single planet was not sufficient for the huge gap between Mars and Jupiter.”41 This line of research was then abandoned and Kepler realized that no new planets were needed.42 It is worth noting that Kepler began his discussion with a recognition of the gaps in the Copernican system that seems to have been an embarrassment for Rheticus and of no concern to Copernicus. To emphasize these gaps, at the end of chapter 1 of the Mysterium, Kepler presented two plates, one illustrating the Copernican system and the other the Ptolemaic system, both drawn approximately to scale for the first time. Kepler’s solution to the problem of the gaps is given in chapter 2: the

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Figure 12.5. Kepler’s nested planetary orbs: Plate 3 at the end of ch. 2 of the Mysterium cosmographicum.

distances in the Copernican system are a result of God’s cosmic plan. There are six planets (the five visible planets plus the Earth) so that there are five intervals between them. The gaps between the orbs leave exactly enough space for one of the five regular solids: “Copernicus has six spheres . . . and each pair of spheres in such proportion to each other that all these five solids can very readily be fitted in between them” (see figure 12.5).43 A regular solid has the property that all its faces are congruent, and there are only five such solids: the cube, the tetrahedron, the dodecahedron, the icosahedron, and the octahedron, as Kepler ordered them. In contrast to his predecessors from Ptolemy to Copernicus, Kepler did not take orbs to be material; rather, the orbs are defined by the greatest and least distance of a planet from the Sun and these distances are fixed by the size of the interplanetary regular solids, understood geometrically rather than as physical objects.44 According to Kepler, Copernicus reasoned from the observed data, a posteriori, “by a lucky rather than a confident guess . . . all that . . . is established [by me] . . . by reasoning a priori from the causes, from the idea of Creation.”45 Kepler later explained in chapter 14: “How greatly unequal the numbers would have been [between those derived by Copernicus and those that depend on the nested regular solids], if this undertaking had been contrary to Nature, that is, if God himself at the Creation had not

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looked to these proportions. For certainly it cannot be accidental that the proportions of the solids are so close to these intervals.”46 As Kepler acknowledged, the agreement between the distances in the Copernican system with the distances that depend on his nested solids is not precise, but his argument here is based on numerical agreement (or nearly so), as was the case in Ptolemy’s original account. Philosophical Reflections Cross-cultural Issues. The most striking feature of the nesting hypothesis is the persistence of a theory for a very long period of time in many different cultural contexts. Cosmology is often associated with religious views on creation. The nesting hypothesis and its associated cosmology originated in a pagan context, that is, for Ptolemy and for most Greeks in antiquity the planets are immortal divine beings. Indeed, cosmos for the Greeks connoted order in contrast to chaos, and it had aesthetic and moral characteristics as well.47 This pagan view was certainly not acceptable to adherents of any of the monotheistic faiths. So why did virtually all Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scholars in the Middle Ages accept this hypothesis? It seems that the answer has to do with the status of astronomy as a discipline, for the nesting hypothesis was associated with astronomy rather than with doctrines concerning creation, which is where cosmology entered religious discussions. It has previously been argued that astronomy was a “neutral zone” where, in the Middle Ages, Muslims, Jews, and Christians could collaborate, without introducing religious polemics.48 It is now evident that the nesting hypothesis belongs in this category as well. We emphasize that in the period under discussion astronomy and cosmology were different domains; some texts were exclusively concerned with astronomical issues (the angular positions of the planets at any given time),49 while others were devoted to cosmological issues (the arrangement of the planets in three dimensions with respect to one another). Levi ben Gerson was exceptional in that he addressed both domains in the same work. There Is Nothing Useless in Nature. Ptolemy probably got this teleological principle from Aristotle’s De caelo II.11 (291b12): “Nature does nothing without reason or in vain.”50 As we have seen, this principle, which was not restricted to a specific domain, was accepted by Ptolemy’s successors. The primary philosophical difficulty with gaps between the planetary orbs is that the gaps were perceived as having no useful purpose. In very different cultural contexts, both Ptolemy and Kepler were explicit about the data not

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agreeing precisely with the principle, but that did not make them lose confidence in the principle. On the contrary, they sought ways to account for the gaps. For Ptolemy the numerical data based on observations is sensitive to slight changes in the observed quantities. And he added that the gap is not big enough to fit a planet between Venus and the Sun. Al-Battānī modified the data to make the agreement exact. Kepler, on his part, inserted five regular solids in the apparent gaps; again, the principle was taken to be more secure than the data. This is the reason for Ptolemy and Kepler (among others) adding “very nearly.” What we witness then is the power of an a priori principle to which scholars adhered over many centuries and they sought to accommodate the data to the principle. This historical fact is methodologically significant, that is, whatever the details of a cosmic theory, it had to comply with a parsimonious principle of teleology. The Persuasive Power of Numerical Agreement. Ptolemy was convinced that he had found the true description of the cosmos largely because of the numerical agreement (very nearly) between the distance from the Earth to the Sun based on the nesting hypothesis and determined independently by eclipse measurements. To be sure, this principle of numerical agreement could only be applied in a science where the results are given quantitatively, and astronomy and cosmology were virtually alone in this category in ancient and medieval times. Ptolemy’s followers disagreed over some details in the nesting hypothesis, but all of them accepted numerical agreement as the criterion for truth. Surprisingly, Kepler was also convinced that his theory of nested regular solids was true by appealing to this principle, even though he was well aware that Ptolemy’s hypothesis was false despite this agreement. What went wrong for Ptolemy? It turns out that the distance to the Sun based on eclipse measurements is extremely sensitive to small errors in the data.51 As a result, Ptolemy’s value for the solar distance is much too small: about 1,200 terrestrial radii instead of the modern value of about 23,000. Kepler’s nesting hypothesis became superfluous with his discovery in 1618 of what was later called his third law of planetary motion, namely, that the periods of the planets about the Sun are proportional to the 3/2 power of their mean distances from the Sun.52 Nevertheless, Kepler did not abandon his version of the nesting hypothesis, which he considered part of the divine cosmic plan: there are exactly five regular solids and they fit between successive pairs of the six planets. The robustness of the principle of numerical agreement was so strong that “minor” deviations from it were generally ignored, as was the case for both Ptolemy and Kepler.

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It is striking that the argument based on numerical agreement for the correctness of theory has been accepted by a wide range of scientists in different periods and in different domains. In some cases, numerical agreement proved to be productive,53 but in others it led to false results. One instructive example occurred at the height of the success of the quantum theory. Robert A. Millikan (1868–1953), Nobel laureate in physics in 1923, remarked, “The [extremely close] agreement [of experimental results with the quantum theory] constitutes the most extraordinary justification of the theory of non-radiating electronic orbits.”54 And Millikan added: “The success of a theory is often tested . . . by the exactness of the fit between calculated and observed results. The theory of electronic orbits has had remarkable successes of this sort.”55 For Millikan a theory may be deemed successful if the calculated results fit the observations to a high level of accuracy. In effect, as we now know, Millikan’s confidence in the theory, based on numerical agreement, was unwarranted. Despite Millikan’s confidence in the quantum theory, it was shown to be false in 1925.56 Conclusion The nesting hypothesis is an example of a theory that was accepted, with modifications, in a wide variety of cultural contexts from antiquity to the end of the sixteenth century. It could be said to have been appropriated by each successive culture, for it was not seen as an alien element in any of them.57 The issues raised concerning teleology and numerical agreement continued to be discussed long after the sixteenth century. Indeed, teleological explanations in the physical sciences were still offered in the seventeenth century, despite attempts to eliminate them from scientific discourse by adherents of the new “mechanical philosophy.”58 And appeals to numerical agreement to confirm the correctness of theories are common in modern science—to this day.

Chapter 13 Mara¯gha Observatory A Star in the Constellation of Eurasian Scientific Translation Roxann Prazniak

Marāgha Observatory occupies a unique place in the history of astronomy largely because of the Eurasian reach it achieved under Mongol authority. A fully developed research and educational center, this observatory, like so many institutions of the Mongol era, generated innovative intellectual discourse, a consequence, often unintended, of the circulation and ferment of contemporary knowledge on an unprecedented scale. Scholars and their texts moved along commercial and diplomatic routes according to the contingencies of contemporary conditions in which Tabriz and Constantinople were among the primary cultural contact zones. George Saliba has written, “If one were to seek a specific century that could be called the Golden Age of Arabic astronomy, one would have to choose the period stretching from the middle of the thirteenth to the middle of the fourteenth.”1 It is no coincidence that these years precisely define the era of the Mongol empire. Marāgha Observatory, in fact, owed its existence and prosperity as a premier institution to the Mongol rulers of the Ilkhanate in Tabriz. Unique conditions generated by Mongol governance made possible this golden age of transcontinental cultural transmission wherein developments in astronomy were a standout achievement. Strategies required to govern a vast continent-wide empire inadvertently created an environment 227

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for unprecedented intellectual dialogue. Not only did astronomers from many regions meet at Marāgha, but astronomers also mingled with specialists from diverse craft and technical backgrounds. Such circumstances facilitated an expansive, eclectic approach to knowledge. Intellectual exchange spanned a continent across which medicine, theology, politics, chemistry, and astronomy inhabited an integrated worldview that shaped questions, lines of inquiry, and methods of problem solving. Initial Mongol imperial designs for a royal observatory that would deliver critical data considered politically valuable came from Möngke Khan (r. 1251–59) in the far eastern part of the empire as he made plans to expand Mongol resource networks west into Iranian territories. The Ilkhanid court historian Rashid al-Din recorded that Möngke was especially intelligent and interested in science.2 He purportedly resolved several mathematical errors found in Euclid’s work. Disappointed by inaccuracies in the work of his astronomer from Bukhara, Möngke became aware of the work of Nasir al-Din al-Tūsī (1201–74) at Alamut in Iran and requested his brother Hülegü to send al-Tūsī to him once Iranian territory was secured. Möngke meanwhile became involved with the conquest of Manzi, the southern regions of the former Song dynasty. Tūsī did not especially want to move to Möngke’s Karakorum capital but did want royal patronage for his work to update obsolete observational tables. Hülegü preferred to keep al-Tūsī and his brilliance within his own newly established political domain and subsequently ordered the construction of Marāgha Observatory around 1259/60, the year of Möngke’s death, and put al-Tūsī in charge. A poem by Nizam al-Din al-Isfahani describes the observatory at Marâgah as a “marvel” and a “treat to the eye.”3 The main building was constructed with a high tower and contained a library of over 400,000 volumes. Contemporaries tell of a large building with a dome, open at the top to receive the sun’s rays for taking measurements throughout the seasons beginning with the solar spotlight on the threshold that marked the first day of spring. Mural paintings of the phases of the moon, signs of the zodiac, and representations of the celestial spheres with their epicycles and deferents covered the inside walls. Over the next seven years in this setting at Marāgha, a team of firstrate scholars including those from Alamut, Damascus, Constantinople, and Khanbuliq completed the Star Catalogue (Zij-i Ilkhani) that Möngke had desired. Among this group, Muhyi al-Din al-Maghribi (ca. 1220–83) brought data from his previous work at the Damascus Observatory.4 Fao Munji contributed experience from Chinese astronomical practices to the Marāgha team’s continuing investigation of Islamic scholarship on Ptol-

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Figure 13.1. Modern artist’s reconstruction of Marāgha Observatory. Source: Parviz Vardjavand, La découverte archéologique du complexe scientifique de L’Ovservatoire de Marāqé (Teheran: Université de Tehran, Organization de la Publication Amir Kabir, 1987). Parviz Vardjavand is a professor at the University of Tehran.

emy’s work.5 Muʾayyad al-Dīn al-ʿUrḍī (d. 1266) developed new theorems that for the first time made feasible a non-Ptolemaic conceptualization of planetary motion. Nasir al-Din al-Tūsī reconfigured additional problematic features of Ptolemy’s planetary model and introduced what became known as the Tūsī-couple to explain how circular motion could be translated into

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linear motion. Ibn al-Shatir (1304–75) would later apply mathematical exactitude to empirical data to eliminate the epicycles, eccentrics, and equants inherent in the Ptolemaic models of solar, lunar, and planetary motion. His quantitative methods produced the fourteenth century’s most accurate account of movement in the known universe. Marāgha as Mongol/Islamic Institution Politically the Mongol rulers, like many before them, saw astronomy as a practical investment related to their divinely ordained rulership. Political leaders expressed keen interest in and often direct knowledge of astronomy. At the same time, astronomers for their part required political patronage to pursue their own intellectual quests. The two sets of interests often found common practical ground even when they lacked mutual philosophical agreement. For example, astronomers working within the fields of Islamic scholarship did not in principle subscribe to astrological applications of their data and were often opposed to such practices. This, however, did not prevent an occasional bend toward the prophetic arts by some including Marāgha’s lead astronomer Nasir al-Din al-Tūsī who from contemporary records appears to have checked his birth horoscope when not feeling well one day after which he decided to attend to his last will and died a few days later.6 Whether in popular imagination or actual fact, this story does suggest an appreciation for astrological clues to the uncertainties of temporal life. As for the Ilkhans, they held a definite belief in the potential predictive value of accurate astrological charts and the political advantages this information might bring over opponents who commanded astrologers of lesser abilities. Motivation to support astronomical studies derived equally from the Ilkhan’s understanding that government sponsorship of scholarly projects was in central Asia and vicinity a long-standing social signifier of successful, imperial leadership; accordingly, the Ilkhans cultivated superior talent and state of the art facilities at Marāgha. In tandem with the Mongol political vision of universal empire, astronomers and scholars from all over Eurasia were in residence at Marāgha, bringing Chinese and Hindu astronomy into dialogue with Arabic and Greek as well as Catalan, Byzantine, and other schools of learning. Relative longevity of political support for the Marāgha Observatory was a critical factor in the institution’s intellectual productivity.7 The sustained Mongol vision of world conquest created the motivation and infrastructure essential to Marāgha’s continuing place in a web of rich intellectual dis-

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course. Sustained political support translated into continuity for scholarly discussions and accumulation of data indispensable to results dependent on these conditions. With regard to resources, Aydin Sayılı has noted that Marāgha was the first Islamic observatory to survive its founder and the first to receive waqf revenues.8 Ilkhan Ghazan and others reinvented the Islamic use of the waqf (charitable trust) to great advantage. Although the waqf traditionally functioned as a legally recognized system for establishing endowments for religious institutions, the Mongols in the Ilkhanate extended this practice to more secular institutions including the observatory at Marāgha, providing it with a legally protected, secure financial foundation extending beyond the lifetimes of individual rulers. Such long-range fiscal planning for an observatory was unique in the thirteenthcentury world. Because most Islamic religious cohorts formally discouraged astrology, transfer of the waqf endowment system to an institution that produced astrological charts technically constituted a philosophical misuse of the waqf system’s original intent. With this line blurred, data collection, manuscript preparation, seminar planning, and library acquisition could proceed at unprecedented levels with positive consequences for the advancement of both astrological and astronomical knowledge. For example, a portion of the waqf endowment raised through imperial grants supported the all-important teaching mission of the Observatory. Students and teachers from both within and beyond the empire benefited from this practice. When Nasir al-Din al-Tūsī died, his one hundred or so students continued to receive support for their studies, guaranteeing a continuity of intellectual development and knowledge transfer across the generations. In other words, the developments at Marāgha by Tūsī, al-ʿUrḍī, Fao Munji, and Qazwini so crucial to later astronomy were far from an expected natural and inevitable unfolding of intellectual curiosity within Islamic scholarship and other scholarly traditions. Translation discourse at Marāgha was both interdisciplinary and multicultural. Sciences discussed at Marāgha included alchemy, medicine, and agriculture—all of which were considered connected to astronomical data. Seyed Hadi Tabatabaie currently of the Research Institute for astronomy at Marāgha and Ali Ajabshirizadeh of the Physics Department at the University of Tabriz identify the Ilkhanid Marāgha Observatory as unique for its engineers and scientists from multiple branches of learning as well as its manuscript production agenda.9 For the first time Arabic, Tibetan, and Chinese traditions related to astronomical studies came into full contact with one another. There were few, if any, artificial barriers and much in-

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centive to attempt translation and open dialogue. Because the Observatory library housed a wealth of materials on all subjects, scholars made every effort to spend time there for research and study. A scholar and prelate within the Syriac Orthodox Church, Abu-I-Faraj Gregory Bar ‘Ebroyo, composed several texts while at Marāgha including titles translated Storehouse of Mysteries (1271/72), the Ascension of the Mind (1278/79), and the Arabic History of the Dynasties (1286); he also left behind his margin notes in a copy of al-Tūsī’s Arabic version of Euclid’s Elements.10 Unlike the eighth-century translation movement in Baghdad that required several generations before Greek and Indian math and science were fully integrated into Islamic intellectual discourse, at Marāgha exchange began immediately and was actively encouraged. During the Mongol period Ilkhanid rulers including Hülegü, Abaqa, and Ghazan embraced a philosophical orientation rooted in Mongol Shamanism and Tibetan Buddhism that facilitated rather than impeded this process, for the latter especially carried in its universalism a more inclusive perspective wherein all knowledge might find a place in a hierarchy of truths. Such inclusiveness potentially promoted unlimited knowledge collection, transmission, and translation. Problems of Empire: Time and Space From the astronomical texts collected in 1323 in the Safina-yi Tabriz, a privately commissioned miscellany containing seven works on astronomy and astrology, we can glimpse structures of thought related to questions of time and space interconnecting the social and astral planes. In a selection on The Essence of Astronomy, al-Tūsī expanded on the “duration of the month and year for each nation” related to information in almanacs that were used to determine “elections, monthly diagrams of the ascendant, lots, diagrams for the conjunctions and oppositions of the Sun and Moon and for solar and lunar eclipse predictions, . . . according to the customs of each nations.”11 Arabic, Byzantine, Persian, and Maliki (Seljuq) calendars all needed to be consulted. The cosmos might affect everyone, but it did so according to the customs of each group. This view was accepted, not disputed, not challenged or rebuked. Precedent for including a range of astronomical systems existed before the Mongol Empire, however, the conditions of Mongol rule encouraged an expanded approach. Muhyi al-Din al-Marhribi (d. 1283), who produced his Taj al-azyaj (Crown of computations) at Damascus in 1258 before going to work at Marāgha, organized his observations around four historical epochs and their astronomical sys-

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tems—Byzantine, Coptic, Persian, and Islamic. With the fall of Baghdad to Hülegü in 1258, al-Marhribi quickly sized up the situation and set his sights on a position in the new ruler’s state-sponsored observatory. With this in mind, and understanding the political side of astronomy, al-Marhribi added an era defined by Hülegü’s rule as well as calendars from the Jewish and Christian traditions.12 The Taj al-azyaj also provided tables for converting data from one system to another. Mongol centers of control by inclination and necessity sought to leverage translation and comparative modes of thought to their imperial advantage with unintended consequences for the development of astronomy. Because the Mongols oversaw an empire of commercial exchange that connected polities from the Korean Peninsula to the Iberian Peninsula, political power over a diverse population in which the Mongols were a small minority required constant demonstrations of the rulers’ ability to offer a universal vision as well as harness and distribute valuable resources. Decrees that held this multiverse together and kept hierarchies in place had to be easily understood. Expectations and consequences needed to be clear without doubt. The multiple calendars and astronomical systems that organized time and space in diverse places introduced complexities beyond the established Islamic use of astronomical data to set the times for prayer five times a day. For example, an Ilkhanid imperial decree arriving in Khurasan or Kayseri from Tabriz on the subject of revenue collection or coordination of military resources required detailed knowledge of Persian or Byzantine calendars in this case. An exact schedule of compliance dates, and a timetable of consequences for noncompliance would forestall excuses and bureaucratic confusion over when things were to happen. Accurate translation among multiple calendars and familiarity with the astronomical data on which they were based was mandatory. Transmission of Marāgha Scholarship As a manuscript production center, Marāgha played the critical role of preserving research results for scholarly circulation and teaching. Extant copies of the Kitab suwar al-kawakib al-thabita (The book of constellations) by Umar al-Sufi (d. 986), preserved today in the British Library, are attributed to workshops at Marāgha where they were reproduced and illustrated between 1260 and 1280. Unique mirror images of constellations, intended for instructional purposes, were painted in a refined Seljuk style that reflected “contemporary fashion in visual culture.”13 Manuscript transmission took

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place through a class of scholar/bureaucrats that was “linked to the traditional religious bureaucracy by training and to the leading Turko-Mongol families by their administrative roles.”14 The Zij-i Ilkhani (Star catalogue), which was the major work to come out of Marāgha, was widely distributed and translated, reaching as far as Dadu of the Mongol Yuan dynasty in the east and Byzantine Constantinople and points west. Some texts were intended specifically as teaching materials such as The Essence of Astronomy by Nasir al-Din Tūsī, composed at the request of his students. This primer could easily be circulated and translated by scholars and interested heads of state. The Safina-yi Tabriz, a collection of contemporary writings deemed most important for a learned person’s education, provides one example of domestic transmission of astronomical knowledge. The copyist selected literary and theological pieces in addition to texts produced by the Marāgha astronomers, reminding us of the interdisciplinary approach to both teaching and research. Of the seven texts related to astronomy that were deemed important to include in the Safina-yi Tabriz, two were written in poetic form and two were written specifically to offer astrological advice for personal choices. “Prediction” in these texts applies both to methods for calculating the position of the moon, sun, and planets and to prescriptive interpretations for advice on the assumed relationship between stars and human behavior. In order for the latter to be useful, the former must be accurate. In a section of the Poetic Introduction to the Science of Astrology, Tūsī wrote that he “started writing the present ‘Introduction’ because, after theology, no science is better than the science of the stars.”15 In Tūsī’s Verse Treatise on Determining Which Zodiacal Sign the Moon Is in without an Almanac, this poetic formula provided a procedure: Double what has passed of the month, Add another five to this. Take the quotient of dividing [the sum] by five from the place of the Sun, Deduct one zodiacal sign, and learn the place of the Moon. However, when the month has passed the twenty-fifth day, Do not apply the adding of the five to the doubling.16

Although the poetic quality is certainly lost in translation, the poetic meter and the mathematical calculation remain clear. From another source titled, The Free Men’s Companion to the Subtleties of Poems, Tūsī’s contemporary Badr al-Din Jajarmi wrote:

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If you wish to know clearly in which of the signs of the zodiac the Moon is, know first that every month the Sun enters a new sign. For instance, if the Sun should be in the month of Aries, and if the Moon is ten days old, add ten more to that. When the doubling has been done, then add five more. Listen well to this point, allow one sign for each five. Begin from the sign in which the illustrious Sun is.17

The fact that these tricks of the trade were put into poetic form to be used in locales where an almanac was not available is interesting. The method anticipated a widespread social and cultural diffusion of scientific scholarship that carried the weight of authoritative knowledge associated with Marāgha. With accurate calculations on the changing relationships among stars, planets, sun, and moon, prescriptive advice could be offered to the prince at court and the shopkeeper at market. In the Verse Treatise on Predictions Based on the Moon’s Zodiacal Sign, for example, Tūsī offered counsel for what should and should not be done when the moon was in a particular sign of the zodiac. In the selection of the Safina-yi Tabriz titled Astrological Tables the five aspects of the moon (conjunction, sextile, quartile, trine, and opposition) matched with one of the six planets to formulate astrological recommendations. This work included a table of “predictions based on the 28 most common situations and sounds that people encounter in their lives,” a table for the “use of proper food and refraining from improper food in Byzantine months,” and a table based on Persian days related to days favorable for traveling and visiting rulers.18 These guidelines went a long way toward structuring everyday life, again giving them a relevance and value that spotlighted the work at Marāgha and moved data out to a larger social and political framework, while at the same time apparently compromising Islamic scholarly criticisms of astrology. A major transmission of Marāgha scholarship took place in 1267, as already mentioned. According to the Yuan-shih, Jamal-ad-Din brought the Zij-i Ilkhani from Tabriz to Dadu along with drawings of seven astronomical instruments and a wan-nien li (ten-thousand-year calendar).19 This was the same star chart that Byzantine astronomer Gregory Choniades (1240– 1302) translated into Greek and introduced into circles in Constantinople from where it conceivably found its way into European settings. The Zij entered into the library of the Gaocheng Observatory established in 1279 by order of Kubilai Khan under the leadership of his head astronomers Guo Shoujing (1231–1314/16) and Wang Xun (1235–81).20 A notable feature of the

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Zij-i Ilkhani was not only the multinational aspects but also the non-Muslim audience to whom the work was addressed. First, the work was written in Persian, the lingua franca of the Mongol Empire rather than Arabic the classical language of Islamic scholarship. Furthermore, al-Tūsī in his mandatory introductory remarks that by convention referenced Muhammad also noted for the uninformed that Muhammad was born in Mecca. Finally, dates were translated into the calendars used by the Syriac Church of the East Christians, Greeks, Egyptians, Seljuks, Chinese, and Persians.21 The global political intent of the Ilkhans’ management and support of Marāgha Observatory manifests itself clearly. Transmission of Marāgha scholarship into centers west of Tabriz followed diplomatic paths. Scholars such as Maghribi, mentioned above, transported themselves and adjusted their work to meet the desires and interests of rulers, among whom the Mongols were a novel group with distinctive governing conditions. This relationship between astronomer and ruler at Marāgha was dialectical. Astronomers understood how the demands of transcontinental empire required an expanded repertoire of calendars. At the same time, work completed at the Observatory received increased exposure through expanded imperial and missionary networks. Roger Bacon (1214–92), as we will see, appears to have had detailed information on the work and instruments at Marāgha. Beyond Bacon’s reading of reports by William of Rubrick who traveled in the Mongol Empire in 1253–55 and his personal conversations with Rubrick, Bacon was also in touch with fellow Franciscan Ramón Llul (1232–1315) who had an active interest in developments at the Ilkhanid court in Tabriz as well as courtly theological debates in Barcelona, Paris, and Genoa. Llul’s itinerary, in fact, followed many of the routes traversed by learned scholars and their books; he himself promoted the study of Arabic and Mongolian and translated from Arabic to Latin the work of prominent philosopher and mystic al-Ghazali (1056–1111).22 These routes carried concepts and data through diplomatic channels to interested rulers of central and peripheral realms alike. The presentation of current astronomical work from the prestigious Marāgha Observatory spoke volumes of the power and status of any delegation arriving from the Ilkhan’s court, and consequently was automatically of some note. Experts were sometimes sent with these missions to make presentations and answer questions. If they were not sent initially, their presence was often requested in later stateto-state diplomatic exchange. This gave accompanying texts an introduction and jump started the process of domesticating new ideas. Local ideas then traveled back with emissaries to Tabriz and beyond.

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All the major observatories in the post- Marāgha era developed from the Marāgha model and the scholarship it produced. The observatories at Samarqand and Istanbul were the most immediate heirs to Marāgha. Further east in Seoul the Joseon Astronomical Bureau sponsored a number of observing platforms, libraries, and storage facilities with the support of King Sejong (r. 1433–41) of the Joseon dynasty of Korea.23 Although two centuries separated the construction of these observatories, the instruments in both cases were an extension of the work of Guo Shoujing (1276–1314) at Shitian-tai Observatory and the Yuan Astronomical Bureau, home to the Zij-i Ilkhani received from the observatory in Marāgha. The Yuan had, in fact, sponsored a large number of observatories that allowed a north–south integration of observed data that subsequently was employed to extend the charts and methods used by the Marāgha astronomers. The Astronomical Bureau founded during the Yuan continued to translate Islamic astronomical and astrological works such as the Huihui li (Western tables) in the post-Marāgha period. 24 In far western Eurasia, although Roger Bacon had established an observatory at Oxford, it was not on the scale of its contemporaries at Marāgha, Dengfeng (Henan), or Dadu. Not until the sixteenth century with Tycho Brache’s (1546–1601) observatory at Uraniborg in Denmark did the European sector have an observatory in the full sense as had long existed in the Islamic world. Uraniborg Observatory (1576) and the Istanbul Observatory (1575) shared many similar instruments. The mural quadrant and the azimuthal quadrant had long been a part of Islamic astronomy but were new in Europe.25 The Catalonian Connection The Ilkhans had over many generations attempted to negotiate alliances with the Papacy in Rome and other European heads of state against the Mamluks in Egypt while keeping cooperative relations with the Byzantines and acknowledging their subordination to the Yuan rulers.26 In one of the more high-profile missions, Ilkhan Arghun (r. 1284–91) in 1287 sent Rabban Sauma (1220–94), a monk in the Christian Church of the East from Dadu, on a mission to Europe where his spent time in the courts of the French king Philip the Fair, English king Edward I, and finally Pope Nicholas IV. Although Rabban Sauma had traveled to Marāgha for official business several times, there is no evidence that he carried texts from there to the European courts. There is also no suggestion that he did not; we do know he carried gifts and, by contemporary diplomatic custom, books were

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included. What we do know is that none of the European heads of state among those he visited left in the historical record any trace of particular interest in astronomy, although again this was at the time a courtly interest in general. Trusted interpreters who traveled with Rabban Sauma from Tabriz could have served as multilingual translators. As advisers in service to the Ilkhanid court they spoke both Italian and Persian at least. Beyond their immediate mission, their services were not requested. The apparent lack of transmission, given opportunity and lack of interest in this case, is a counterpoint to the possible routes of transmission and definite interest we find in the following instance. Among the European courts with diplomatic channels open for possible transmission of scientific knowledge, the courts of Alfonso X of Castile (1221–84) and King Jaume I of Aragon and Catalonia (1202–76) were perhaps the most receptive. Catalonian scholar Ramón Llul was part of this circle as well. The Alphonsine Chronicles records that an embassy from the “Soldan of Babylon” bearing rich presents arrived in Seville in 1261.27 Possessing keen interest in science and astronomy in particular, Hülegü, founder of the Marāgha Observatory, and Alfonso X both actively promoted scientific exchange. Alfonsine texts such as the Libros del Saber appear to have been copied from texts by Ibn Ishaq, as they carried identical calculation errors. “Andalusi materials were known in Marāgha, and Persian ones in the Iberian Peninsula.”28 Al-Sufi’s star catalogue the Kitab Suwar al-Kawakib was translated into Persian and Castilian, and other Alfonsine texts contain both Persian and Mongolian glosses. Hülegü’s active interest in Marāgha is well-documented by Rashid al-Din who wrote, “He [Hülegü] went to Marāgha, where he was insistent that the observatory be completed. A great lover of wisdom, he encouraged the learned to debate the basic sciences and rewarded them all with stipends and salaries. His court was adorned by the presence of philosophers and scientists.”29 Alfonso’s sponsorship of astronomy in order to create more accurate tables occupied a similar focus at his court with many fewer resources. The astronomical work done at Alfonso’s court had only rudimentary elements of the full interdisciplinary culture that surrounded Marāgha studies, but it did attempt to grapple with translations of al-ʿUrḍī and others, producing observations that “seem to be quite similar to those of the Western Islamic tradition and to represent its direct continuation.”30 The Alphonsine texts were not translated into other European settings at this time but may have circulated or been part of a later diffusion of knowledge. Historian of science R. T. Gunther has noted, “During the 14th century astronomers at Oxford

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used tables in a form that closely resembled the original Alphonsine tables that had been issued from Toledo observatory about 1272.”31 Copernicus quoted Alfonso’s parameter for the tropical solar year in his Commentaries, and he also used Andalusian texts for his Revolution of Heavenly Spheres.32 The special connections among Castile and Catalonia and the Ilkhanate continued through the end of the thirteenth century. Ilkhan Ghazan (r. 1295–1304) further expanded Ilkhanid support for the sciences including astronomy. His projects were newsworthy and potentially traveled along diplomatic and scholarly routes suggested by the Catalonian example. Relations between Catalans and Genoese in Constantinople were active in the period leading up to 1304, and the Catalans were themselves players in east Mediterranean politics, even when they were in retreat.33 A letter written in Barcelona in July 1300 by Romeu de Marimundo, counselor of James II of Aragon, references the role played by Isol de Pisan as arbiter between Ilkhan Ghazan and Henry II of Cyprus and Pope Boniface VIII.34 Ilkhan Ghazan’s interest in astronomy and his innovations in astronomical instruments first alluded to by Rashid al-Din are reflected in a letter dated 1300 from the King of Aragon Jaume II to the “King of the Mongols” Ghazan expressing commitment to cultural and military dialogue with Tabriz.35 A recently discovered anonymous Persian treatise, Risala al-Ghazaniyya fi al-Alat al-Rasaadiyya (Ghazan’s treatise on the observational instruments) from 1300 describes twelve astronomical instruments sponsored by Ghazan for the observatory at Marāgha. These instruments were innovative in their use of straight rules instead of circular structures, the latter being less accurate because of their more complex construction process. The rules themselves were made of copper and teakwood.36 Teak, native only to Southeast Asia, was widely used in east Asia, and was an import into the Ilkhanate territories through their extensive trade networks and command systems. Its hardwood qualities made it especially suitable for improved astronomical instruments. Ghazan frequently visited Marāgha where he engaged scientists in banquets and intellectual discussion. Ilkhanid historian Rashid al-Din recorded that, “In order to measure the circular path of the sun, he [Ghazan] had a dome built according to his own taste and discussed it with the astronomers. They [the scientists] all said, ‘Even though we have never seen such an instrument, it is reasonable.’ At the observatory next to the Abwabu’l-birr in Tabriz, a dome was constructed that contains those things, as can readily be seen.”37 The tremendous imperial reach of the Mongols and the steady access this provided to almost unlimited resources and expertise was something

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contemporary observer Roger Bacon recognized as a revolutionizing aspect of Mongol rule. Bacon, as theologian, scientist, and philosopher, commented on the costly nature of astronomical instruments and the investment he was aware the Mongols of the Ilkhanate had made in this area. His detailed awareness raises the question of what he knew and how he knew it, but clearly, he had some combination of firsthand reports and personal observations. He wrote that such instruments are not to be found among the Latins, nor could they be made for two or three hundred pounds. . . . Without mathematical instruments no science can be mastered. . . . Besides, better tables are indispensably necessary, tables on which the rotations of the heavens are certified from the beginning to the end of the world without daily labour, but these tables are worth a king’s ransom, and could not be made without a vast expense. . . . Thus have the Tartars and Saracens been able to accomplish what they have done. For it is agreed that the Tartars give more time to astronomy than others, since although there are learned astronomers in many nations, the rulers of their state are directed only by such advisers. Astronomers hold the same position among the Tartars as prelates do among us.38

Bacon concluded that the Mongols’ secret to success and world conquest was their dependence on science and especially astronomy. This contemporary perspective is invaluable for understanding the political dynamics of intellectual encounter in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Eurasia. Bacon and al-Tūsī were in complete agreement on the supremacy of astronomy in the range of human intellectual endeavors. There was also no doubt that Marāgha Observatory supported by the Tabriz court stood as the global center of advanced astronomical scholarship, setting a very high competitive standard to which others seeking knowledge and power aspired. Conclusions: Thoughts on al-Tūsī and Copernicus Mongol presence in thirteenth-century Iranian lands was more than a minor affixation to Islamic intellectual and social traditions. In the words of M. Minovi and V. Minorsky, “The established foundations of Islamic civilization were revolutionized by the intrusion of entirely distinct principles and habits hailing from the Farther East.”39 The nature and reach of Ilkhanid political culture was critical for intellectual exchange that might

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otherwise remain only a potential. Such exchange often circulated scholars and texts at multiple levels of discourse resulting in varied degrees of translation, mistranslation, and nontranslation of concepts and ways of thinking that became integral to the processes of knowledge sharing. Most significantly, exchange that involved sharing astronomical data took place through the transmission of bundled packages of intelligence relevant to statecraft tools such as political prognostication and military sciences. During the Mongol period, the most high-powered scholarship came from Marāgha where, in Roger Bacon’s words, the instruments and texts were worth “a king’s ransom,” and he himself spent a small fortune attempting to collect books and devises that would allow him to peer into its halls of knowledge. Returning to the possible connections between Marāgha scholarship and Copernicus’s work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the revolutions of the celestial spheres) (1543), Saliba suggests in general terms that a consideration of the place of Marāgha Observatory in the history of astronomy “not only forces us to reconsider our traditional channels of contacts between Europe and the East, but it also forces us to reconsider the periods of contacts as well as the modes of these contacts.”40 Rendering the generic East in this statement into the specific conditions of the Mongol Empire highlights the unique historical foundations that made the Marāgha revolution possible and moved it out into the wider world. This perspective also challenges the simple, ahistorical view that “Copernicus picked up where Ptolemy left off.”41 No scholar in the thirteenth century or later was simply starting where Ptolemy left off. The history of science took shape, as Marāgha demonstrates, as an exchange within the context of regional histories and world historical developments, affirming the position that any intellectual development of note is one moment situated in a nonlinear genealogy of ideas and social conditions. Although al-Tūsī and Copernicus may both have been attempting to work out the irregularities of Ptolemy’s astronomy, there was nothing natural, obvious, or automatic about either’s efforts. What was increasingly deemed less acceptable to alTūsī and then Copernicus was the mental habit of letting received mathematical constructs go unchallenged by additional empirical evidence. Matters of science and faith continued to inform the work of al-Tūsī and Copernicus in significant ways that would not be the case when in later centuries states became nation-states and different priorities prevailed. Although Hülegü and other Ilkhans supported astronomy out of their own intellectual curiosity and statecraft calculations, from the vantage point of

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al-Tūsī and others, astronomy was about self-knowledge and one’s relationship to god. Sufi-inspired methods of idrak, the unification of knowledge through mathematical models, rituals, and self-development, produced some technical results similar to Copernicus’s heliocentric construct.42 For both al-Tūsī and Copernicus, mathematics was an absolute truth tethered to moral and philosophical considerations about man, god, and his universe; it did not preclude the necessity of intuitive knowledge, but in fact required it as a matter of faith. In the century between Marāgha and Copernicus, the leading intellect of fifteenth-century Florence, Ficino, insisted primarily on the importance of astrology for achieving inner balance.43 Kepler and Newton in the seventeenth century inhabited a worldview in which understanding the physical universe was profoundly and essentially integrated with questions of inner human potential and action in the world—the music of the spheres for Kepler and alchemy for Newton. When Ibrahim Efendi translated Copernicus’s work into the Ottoman world based on ideas he encountered in the writings of French author Noël Duret, he was most interested in Kepler’s ideas on the elliptical path of planets because they addressed useful knowledge relevant to notions of idrak; he found heliocentrism of little interest, a view shared by Duret.44 Within its Eurasian context, Copernicus’s work was one among many lines of inquiry consistent with Marāgha scholarship, both in terms of technical developments and spiritual approach. While it is impossible to pinpoint exact pathways of shared mathematical discovery from al-Tūsī to Copernicus, the inclination to do so is somewhat misguided. The question for the history of science is more a matter of political culture than intellectual descent. A particular constellation of social and intellectual conditions made some ideas, and not others, not only visible but valuable. Copernicus under Roman Church auspices was seeking to fix a date for Easter within a particular political and theological framework. Few at Marāgha were similarly preoccupied, although al-Maghribi was interested in the question of determining Easter, presumably to address the Christian constituency at the Tabriz court.45 The concept of heliocentrism had arisen in the history of astronomy at other junctures but was of little interest to contemporary thinkers. The astronomer of ancient Greece, Aristarchus of Samos, conceived of a heliocentric universe; his views passed without impact on his own cultural environment, and Copernicus does not appear to have known of his work.46 Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi (1236–1311), a student of al-Tūsī, explicitly considered a heliocentric planetary system, as did Al-Qazwini al-Katibi, but again these

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ideas emerged with gaining any traction. To be fair, even Copernicus’s model was generally ignored past its heuristic value for setting a more accurate date for Easter. Only a handful of thinkers that included Galileo and Kepler pursued the logic of heliocentrism in a volatile theological and political environment that would push astronomical studies into revolutionary social and intellectual territory. Links between Marāgha and Mediterranean centers of scholarship remain open as do explicit connections between the work of al-Tūsī and Copernicus. However, the chances of independent discovery of the tools Copernicus required to formulate his heliocentric theory are diminished by well-documented extensive evidence of cultural contact and exchange beginning with the Mongol era. By the sixteenth century, Marāgha scholarship flowed freely and was highly sought after. If one grants a Eurasian frame of reference for Copernicus, the Samarqand Observatory, modeled on Marāgha, under the guidance of Ulugh Beg (1394–1449) suggests a possible transmission path. In the aftermath of political turmoil, Ulugh Beg’s disciple Ali Kushiji carried the Ulughbeg Zidj (Catalogue of stars) (1437) to Europe where it was widely known. This catalogue was at the time the most accurate accumulation of Marāgha and post-Marāgha astronomical data. From the Mongol era forward, transmission from Marāgha became a part of the Eurasian scientific endowment.

Chapter 14 Reading between the Lines Attitudes toward Arabic Astrology in the Latin Marginalia of Alcabitius’s Introductorius ad magisterium iudiciorum astrorum Margaret Gaida

Composed in the middle of the tenth century, al-Qabīṣī’s Kitāb al‐mudkhal ilā ṣināʿat aḥkām al‐nujūm, or Alcabitius’s Introductorius ad magisterium iudiciorum astrorum, provides a brief introduction to the principles of astrology.1 Alcabitius wrote several other geometrical and astronomical treatises, and dedicated four of them to the Ḥamdānid Emir of Aleppo, Sayf al-Dawla. In his dedication to the Introduction, Alcabitius purports to collect together all the necessary information one needs in order to practice astrology, drawing on the wisdom of his predecessors, who are both Greek and Arabic. Little is known of Alcabitius’s life, but his astrological text became widely popular in medieval and early modern Europe. After its translation into Latin by John of Seville in the 1130s, several copies were made and the text circulated across southern Europe. The Introduction was eventually incorporated into universities, as indicated by commentaries from Paris and Bologna in the 1320s and 1330s. Over two hundred extant Latin manuscripts are scattered in libraries across Europe. 244

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Several additional Latin commentaries, as well as translations into Hebrew, Castilian, Italian, French, German, English, and Dutch indicate the broad and diverse medieval readership of the text. Twelve printed editions, ranging from 1473 to 1521, and two commentaries from the 1560s, illustrate the longevity of the text’s popularity. Evidence from the marginalia of manuscripts from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries illustrates that Latin readers had a sustained interest in Arabic texts, and treated the Arabic tradition as the premier authority on astrological knowledge for centuries after the initial translations in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The fate of Alcabitius’s text in Europe was, of course, not unique. When scores of originally Greek and Arabic scientific, medical, and philosophical texts were translated into Latin in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in several locales in Spain, Sicily, and Italy, the superiority and authority of Arabic learning was immediately evident. Known most commonly by their Latinized names, Avicenna, whose medical Canon of Medicine became the most important medical work in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and Averroës, referred to as “The Commentator” among medieval Latin scholars for his superb commentaries on Aristotle, are two of the bestknown examples. In the case of astrology, a recent survey of the numbers of astrological manuscripts in medieval Europe indicates that the Arabic tradition made up the majority of astrological texts until the late fifteenth century.2 Despite their massive contributions to medieval European philosophical and scientific thought, in histories of science from the nineteenth century onward the Arabs were seen as mere vessels that transported the wisdom of the ancient Greeks back to its rightful place in Europe. Early in the twentieth century, Charles Homer Haskins and George Sarton proposed modifications to this narrative in their emphasis on the importance of the Arabic tradition.3 It has still taken decades for historians of science to treat Arabic authors as equal to or even surpassing their Greek predecessors, in terms of the significance, depth, and complexity of their scientific and philosophical work as well as the influence of this work on the European intellectual tradition.4 Most medieval and early modern historians of science acknowledge the indebtedness that the subjects of their scholarly studies have to the Islamic world, but Eurocentric perspectives, manifested as a subtle or sometimes overt Orientalism, persists in much of their work.5 One possible historiographical response to this Eurocentric vision of knowledge production is simply to make the Islamic world the center and

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put Europe at the periphery of one’s methodological approach. This would be particularly obvious for those who study the philosophical and scientific output of the Islamic Golden Age, which far surpasses anything available in Europe at the time in terms of sophistication and intellectual depth. More recent scholarship, however, has emphasized the decentering of knowledge production by suggesting that methodological approaches should not focus on the traditional linguistic, cultural, or geographical barriers imposed (somewhat) artificially by modern historians. Sonia Brentjes, Alexander Fidora, and Matthias Tischler argue for research that considers “heterogeneous, multifaceted cultures, many and unstable frontiers between them, cross-cultural relationships and shared lives, small-scale local, individually defined projects, personal encounters between members of different communities who pursued different interests and adhered to different beliefs, other actors than translators and patrons and other activities than translating, writing, and reading.”6 This approach is extraordinarily insightful for dealing with the complicated landscape of the twelfth century, but does not necessarily or easily transfer onto the later medieval period, when texts of Arabic origin continued to be read, discussed, and commented upon. In addition to a methodological decentering of knowledge production in the medieval Mediterranean, historians have explored other approaches to grappling with the complexities of the transmission and reception history of Greek and Arabic texts in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Several scholars have published brilliant investigations and critical editions of the Latin translations of Arabic texts.7 These focused studies on individual texts provide starting points for contextualized accounts, including projects that seek to better understand the reasons that the texts were translated, the early contexts of readership, the scale of Islamic influence, the level of authority attributed to the Islamic tradition, and the results of processes of assimilation in Latin scholarship. Contemporary scholars have also used the Latin-Arabic translations to look more generally at methodological issues related to transmission and appropriation.8 As many of these contributions involve particular case studies within a well-articulated methodological framework, it is difficult to draw conclusions regarding the scale and duration of influence of the Arabic tradition in Europe. Thus many questions remain regarding the lasting influence of the Arabic scientific and philosophical tradition in Europe, especially concerning attitudes toward the Arabic tradition among medieval and early modern scholars.9 This further underscores the need for explorations of the contexts of as-

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similation of Arabic learning, in medicine, philosophy, natural philosophy, astronomy, and astrology. This brings us back to the central focus of this essay, the textual history of Alcabitius’s Introduction to Astrology in the Latin West. By studying the reception of this text through its readership, and specifically through marginalia and annotations in medieval Latin manuscripts, I hope to address the following questions: What hidden assumptions are there in studying the reception of an Arabic text by looking solely at the Latin manuscript tradition, and ignoring the context of the text’s composition? In what ways were medieval Latin readers cognizant of the Arabic origins of the text, and what were their attitudes toward Arabic learning? How did attitudes toward Arabic learning change in different temporal and cultural contexts? A survey of some of the most vocal supporters and opponents of Arabic learning across the medieval period indicates the need for further study of these questions. Adelard of Bath, for example, recounts a conversation in which his nephew urges him to discuss “some new item from the studies of the Arabs,” and later asks him to justify his preference for the “opinions of the Saracens” over the Christian “schools of Gaul.”10 Adelard translated Albumasar’s Abbreviation to the Introduction to Astrology, and also wrote a treatise on the astrolabe. His enthusiasm for Arabic learning was echoed by scores of other translators, and is also apparent in the critical and enthusiastic remarks one finds in the marginalia and annotations of early astrological manuscripts. Criticism of Arabic learning appeared as early as the fourteenth century in the humanistic thought of Petrarch and Dante.11 However, while there was frequently critical opposition to astrology in the medieval period, most often directed at the threat of a deterministic universe posed for Christian free will, critiques of the authority of the Arabic astrological tradition came under attack much later. At the end of the fifteenth century, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola embedded a jibe at the Arabs in his Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem when he condemned their superstitious “false stories,” which the Latins followed.12 Another critic of astrological practice, Albertus Pighius, denounced prognosticators ignorant of mathematics who were dependent on the “abandoned fables” of Albumasar and the Arabs.13 Girolamo Cardano, the famed physician and astrologer, “maintained that a ‘return to Ptolemy’ was necessary to restore dignity and rigor to a discipline seriously corrupted by the ‘follies’ of the Arabs’ manuals, which [he] criticized for offering rules as manifold and minute as they were unfounded and use-

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less.”14 Cardano also mentions Alcabitius explicitly in his condemnation of the Arabs, writing that “astrologers must free themselves from all the ballast of the various ‘Albumasars, Abenragels, Alchabitiuses, Abubatres, Zaheles, Messahalas, and Bethenes.’”15 From piecing together this sequence of anecdotes, it is unclear whether these opinions represent a vocal minority or if the foundations of Arabic astrological authority began to crumble as the sixteenth century wore on. However, Valentin Naibod’s 1560 commentary on Alcabitius’s Introduction, as well as the publication of several other Arabic astrological texts well into the sixteenth century, casts doubt on the idea that readers had begun to lose faith in the reliability of the Arabic tradition. The fate of Arabic astrology in the sixteenth century certainly warrants further study, but for earlier centuries, the marginalia and annotations provide us with evidence of how individual readers encountered and reflected upon Arabic texts.16 Through an analysis of the marginalia in five manuscripts of Alcabitius’s Introduction, I reveal how citation practices and annotations are indicative of attitudes toward Arabic astrology in particular, and Arabic learning more generally. The marginalia presented here range from one of the earliest manuscripts of the text, dating to the thirteenth century, to some of the latest manuscripts of the text, which date to the late fifteenth century.17 Approximately one-third of the thirty manuscripts I have studied contain marginalia that are substantial enough to consider in this study.18 All the various forms of marginalia play a role in reconstructing the history of the text’s readership and in understanding the subtle cues and assumptions about Arabic learning among Alcabitius’s readers. These attitudes are indicative of Alcabitius’s most engaged and critical readers, because these were the individuals who bothered to actually write in the text. Furthermore, the annotation practices preserved in the text are evidence of readers’ interpretations, evaluations, and implicit assumptions that were absorbed by later readers. In examining the marginalia in particular manuscripts, I would like to highlight two main points. The first issue concerns the obvious presence of Arabic source material in the text, including transliterated Arabic terms (both for technical astrology and words for which no Latin equivalent was immediately found by the translator), marginal definitions of these terms, citations of Arabic authors, and references to Islam or to the Islamic calendar. These aspects of the text constitute the primary points of analysis. Second, I examine some of the codicological evidence, which helps to establish specific contexts of readership.

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Citations of Arabic Authors By the end of the thirteenth century, the majority of the Arabic astronomical-astrological tradition had been translated into Latin. Many of these authors are included in Albertus Magnus’s late thirteenth-century Speculum astronomiae, and Alcabitius is among them.19 The two astrological authors cited most frequently in all manuscripts of the Introduction are Ptolemy and Albumasar. Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos (originally written in the second century CE) was translated in 1138 by Plato of Tivoli, with its most important commentary, by Haly ibn Ridwan, translated in the thirteenth century. Albumasar composed two introductory texts on astrology, a lengthier one referred to as The Great Introduction, and a shorter one known as the Abbreviation to the Introduction. These texts were translated roughly contemporaneously with Alcabitius’s Introduction in the 1130s, the former by the same translator Johannes Hispalensis and the latter by Adelard of Bath. It is important to note that while Alcabitius draws heavily from Albumasar’s work, he does not once cite him by name. This is not true for other authors, including Ptolemy, Dorotheus, Messahallah, and others that Alcabitius refers to frequently. The other Arabic authors cited in the margins by Latin annotators of Alcabitius manuscripts are Alkindi, Haly, and Zael. The earliest readers of Alcabitius’s Introduction were well aware of Albumasar’s influence, as he is frequently cross-referenced, occasionally with specific sections and chapters in either the Great Introduction or Abbreviation. In this early period of readership, exemplified by Vaticanus latinus (Vat. lat.) 4079, Albumasar is referenced more often than Ptolemy. In Vat. lat. 4079 Albumasar is cited four times in the annotations; on two occasions the references include a specific book and section of Albumasar’s Abbreviation, and in another a reference to the Great Introduction.20 In other manuscripts, Albumasar is cited as an authority in support of a particular claim being made or as an alternative to a specified value or statement. While it is not always clear whether the intent of the annotator was to provide authoritative support or an alternative value, early Latin readers compared different Arabic astrological authors, and in doing so they noticed variations in astronomical values and occasionally in astrological technique. Although Ptolemy’s texts are certainly included in these efforts toward astrological collation and the creation of a coherent theoretical framework, the frequency and manner of citation suggest that the most interesting and important astrological texts are from the Arabic tradition. Several of Alcabitius’s early readers were already familiar with many of

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the basics of astrological theory, as indicated by their notes and comments, and cross-references to Albumasar or Zael. One annotated passage refers to a section of the text in the first chapter where Alcabitius provides the definition of astrological aspects.21 An “aspect” is the relationship, defined by different degrees, that a planet has to another planet with respect to its position in the zodiac. The trine aspect (120 degrees) and sextile aspect (60 degrees) are a relationship of friendship, whereas the quartile aspect (90 degrees) and opposition (180 degrees) are characterized by enmity. Alcabitius further explains, “and when two planets are in one sign, they are called ‘in conjunction.’”22 Two manuscripts contain annotations with a more specific definition of a conjunction, where the planets must have less than 15 degrees between them. One of these two manuscripts, dated to the end of the thirteenth century, attributes this definition to Zael.23 A different hand also cites Albumasar: “The aspect, he says, is from a sign to a sign, the most powerful [is] from degree to degree, as Albumasar says.”24 This shows that early Latin readers were comparing and commenting on astrological authorities, demonstrating their commitment to and enthusiasm for the Arabic astrological tradition. Indeed, a critical attitude is often applied to Alcabitius’s Introduction, which occasionally has a tendency to simplify material. Comparing citations of Arabic authors with Greek authors as well as with contemporary Latin authors, we find that at least within Arabic astrological texts, Arabic authors are cited the most frequently. It is unlikely to find contemporary Latin scholars mentioned in marginalia in the early manuscripts. In over twenty-five manuscripts, about a quarter of which contain substantial marginalia, a Latin author is only mentioned once, and it was the translator, Johannes Hispalensis.25 Although very few Latin authors were composing new astrological texts, it is interesting that ancient and early medieval astronomical and astrological authors preserved in the Latin tradition are absent from the marginalia. Their absence in many ways underscores the authority afforded to the Arabic tradition by early medieval readers. Citation practices had shifted somewhat by the fifteenth century, when there are more contemporary Latin authors included in marginalia, although mentioning them by name was still relatively infrequent. In one fifteenth-century manuscript, the annotator has composed a fairly lengthy discussion of how to determine which of the planets is the ruler for a particular topic. The annotator mentions the methods of Hermes and Haly, and provides an example of Haly’s method from the annual prediction

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(iudicium) of Joannes de Fundis of Bologna for the year 1445.26 The same manuscript includes two marginal references to Albumasar in a section discussing conjunctions and astrological history, and one to Alkindi. This later manuscript follows the earlier tradition in continuing to cite Arabic authorities more than Greek authors and medieval and Renaissance Latin authors. In the fifteenth century one also finds manuscripts full of very detailed annotations and yet often lacking citations. One example from the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence is Plutei (Plut.) 29.3, copied in 1460, although the annotator has a significantly different script from the scribe, and the annotations were probably made later. This annotator mentions both Ptolemy and Haly, in discussing the technical terms of the astrologers. However, Alcabitius cites Ptolemy here, and the annotator merely repeats this. The annotator was familiar with Haly’s work and was able to identify connections between Alcabitius’s and Haly’s texts.27 What is noteworthy here is that the frequent citations of Arabic authors, which provide alternative methods or support for astrological knowledge, indicate a continued respect and reverence for Arabic authorities at least one hundred years after the translations and this continues well into the fifteenth century. Also notably absent from the manuscripts are any marks of critique or negativity toward Arabic astrology or Arabic learning more generally. Thus in the early period of assimilation of Arabic astrological texts the Latin readers would have considered them to be at least as authoritative, if not more so, than the ancient Greeks, and certainly more authoritative than contemporary European astrological writings. In looking at the citations alone, we may conclude that legitimate astrological knowledge was grounded in Arabic learning. Latin readers viewed Arabic astrology as authoritative, and this attitude does not appear to have decreased over time. We now turn to other aspects of the marginalia that elucidate the strong ties between astrology and the Islamic world. Astrology as an Arabic Science When the Greek corpus of scientific and philosophical thought was translated into Arabic in the eighth and ninth centuries, Arabic scholars referred to Greek learning as the “foreign sciences.”28 This new knowledge was related, albeit distinct, from the predominant Persian and Indian traditions of astronomy and astrology and it was rooted in the philosophy of Aristotle, Plato, and the neo-Platonists. There was nothing like it in the Islamic world prior to the translations.29 The influx of Arabic astrological

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knowledge into Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries created a very similar situation. Remnants from Greek and Roman traditions of learning preserved some elements of classical astronomy and astrology, but this knowledge stemmed from philosophical and literary traditions rather than astronomical and astrological authorities such as Ptolemy.30 Furthermore, unlike the Greco-Arabic translators of the Islamic world, both the Arabic-Latin and Greco-Latin translators of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were either unable or unwilling to find suitable Latin terminology for a range of technical terms.31 Several terms were either transliterated or transliterated in one passage and translated in another, leading to alternative spellings as scribes assimilated the new technical vocabulary. In trying to better understand why medieval Latin translators relied on transliteration as a solution for certain technical terms, one may ask about the extent to which Latin scholars interacted with the thriving Islamic astronomical and astrological community in Andalusia at the time of the translations. Perhaps the meaning of terms was established through oral transmission, as there is some evidence of Latin scholars having Arabic teachers.32 In other locales, Latin scholars who did not have access to the oral tradition were quickly made aware of the complexity of the newly translated texts, which were far beyond European knowledge at the time. Once outside the cultural context of the translations, the transliterated Arabic terms came to epitomize the foreign origins of the Introduction. In reading and annotating the text, Latin scholars retained and assimilated key astrological terms from the Arabic, reflecting their commitment to the authority of Arabic astrological learning.33 The process of translating Arabic astrological and astronomical texts into Latin led to several terminological issues. There were many Arabic astrological terms for which no Latin equivalent was deemed suitable, and thus translators chose to keep the terms as transliterations. Some of these terms originated in the Greek astrological corpus, and some came from Arabic texts (which may have also been influenced by Persian or Indian sources). This is particularly the case for two terms, hyleg and alcochoden, which are technical words referring to calculations based on nativities. Both of these terms have an enormous number of spelling variations in the manuscripts.34 Hyleg refers to a particular celestial point or planet that enables one to calculate the length of one’s life. It is not clearly defined in the Arabic text; rather, a description is given of how to calculate it. Only four Latin manuscripts and the printed edition include the descriptive phrase, “That is the place of life,” following hyleg in the main text.35 Alcochoden is

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defined as “the indicator of the length of life” in the Arabic text, a literal translation of which is included in the Latin text.36 The chapter in which these terms appear, the fourth, addresses the technical terms of the astrologers, and these two have been noted and/or explained in the margins in several of the manuscripts. This implies that they were more important to readers and more frequently calculated, which certainly makes sense, as foreknowledge of the length of one’s life (particularly for rulers) would be enticing in a period when death from war, plagues, illnesses, and childbirth was common. Despite the frequency of calculation and the large number of spelling variations, no one seems to have attempted to come up with Latin terms for these concepts. This reveals their continued respect for the authority of the Arabs. The treatment of hyleg and alcochoden by Latin scholars also indicates how Arabic terminology was assimilated. At the Vatican Library, Palatinus latinus (Pal. lat.) 1372 contains marginalia that provide definitions of these terms, with some significant variation in meaning. First, the annotator has included a gender distinction between the two terms, associating the hyleg with the “wife,” and the alcochoden with the “man/husband.”37 Second, there are further references in the case of hyleg to the quality of life (good or bad) and to well-being (sickness or health).38 No author is cited in these annotations, and it is uncertain where the annotator may have come across this information. It could have appeared in other astrological texts or have been part of an oral tradition, but in either case the annotator was compelled to add this distinction in order to clarify the meaning of the terms. Despite the spelling inconsistencies of Arabic terms in the manuscript tradition, they continued to be used by publishers when the text was printed. Even as the text was adapted to meet the needs and interests of later centuries of Latin readers, the text still retained its Arabic character. For example, the 1512 printing of the Introduction used the author’s name on the title page rather than the Latin title, prominently displaying the Arabic origins of the text (see figure 14.1). In another case, one fourteenth-century manuscript, Pal. lat. 1408, contains marginalia only in red ink, indicating that the reader paid particular attention to the Arabic terminology. The reader has carefully copied and standardized the spelling of Arabic terms in the margins, and corrected spelling in the main text. This indicates an attention to detail and accuracy for Arabic astrological terminology such as hyleg and alchocoden. The “highlighting” of Arabic words in Pal. lat. 1408 exemplifies in vivid, visual form how Latin readers would have encountered foreign cultural elements in the text.

Figure 14.1. Alchabitius cum commento (Venice: Melchior Sessa, 1512). This image of the title page of the 1512 edition of the text illustrates how the Arabic name of the author, Alchabitius, was selected over the actual title, Introduction to Astrology, emphasizing the Arabic origins of the text.

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Lastly, Islamic astrological texts were often self-referential, particularly in discussions related to the great conjunctions and their influence on the rise of religions. This is the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, and it occurs approximately once every twenty years. Albumasar famously associated the rise of Islam with the conjunction between Saturn and Jupiter in the sign of Scorpio in his book Religions and Dynasties.39 In Alcabitius’s fifth chapter, which deals with the calculation of lots, he discusses how to calculate the length of rule for kings. To complete this task, one must base the calculation on the time of the most recent conjunction between Saturn and Jupiter. In Vat. lat. 4079, the annotator explains this example, and mentions the rise of Islam and its association with this conjunction.40 The discussion of the conjunction in the context of the length of rule of kings allows us to gain insight into how this particular reader treated the claim that religions themselves are influenced by planetary configurations. The reader appears to accept the idea that the configuration influenced the rise of Islam, but makes no mention of the relationship between the great conjunctions and Christianity. In the first commentary written on Alcabitius’s text by John of Saxony at Paris in the 1330s, about a century after Vat. lat. 4079 and possibly contemporaneous with the annotator of the text, John briefly discusses the association of the rise of Islam with the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, but states that he does not discuss celestial influence on the other religions because the notion “does not agree with our faith.”41 Perhaps discussing the great conjunction solely within the Islamic context was a licit means for understanding and employing the concept more generally. The annotations of Vat. lat. 4079 illustrate the sense that astrology in Europe, as introduced and articulated by the Arabs, was a foreign science. Up to this point I have used the marginalia and annotations to provide specific examples of the extent to which Latin readers were both aware of and responded to the Arabic tradition of astrological knowledge. Now we must turn to the question of context, which will enable us to understand how the text was used by communities of readers, and who those readers likely were. Contexts of Readership The marginalia present clear evidence of readership. Although we may be able to date and localize the script, the identity of the annotator is often unknown unless a specific name is mentioned. Additional evidence gleaned

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from codicological features of the manuscript can also help to establish where readers encountered the text (and potentially inscribed marginalia). Unfortunately, very few dates, place-names, or ownership inscriptions tied to individual hands appear in the extant manuscripts of the Introduction. Even when a manuscript contains the name of a scribe, for example, annotators very rarely claimed their own marginalia. This makes the task of uncovering precise contexts quite difficult. Nevertheless, we may consider the scant evidence known to us regarding specific individuals, times, or places, and reconstruct other possible contexts taking cues from the marginalia itself. The earliest readers of the Introduction began to contribute marginalia at the same time that Latin translations of other Arabic texts were becoming available. The date of the Gloss has not been definitively determined, but the editors of the critical edition propose that the Gloss was added during this period in the 1120s and 1130s.42 The earliest reference to Alcabitius is from Raymond of Marseilles, in 1141, and one of the lots from Alcabitius’s fifth chapter appears in a horoscope for Henry, Duke of Normandy, in 1151.43 The earliest date in any of the manuscripts is 1181, although the editors of the critical edition have also noted that this may be an erroneous attribution.44 The manuscript that contains this date also contains a significant amount of marginalia, most of which appear to be explanatory or provide alternative spellings of Arabic terminology. Thus, the assimilation of Arabic astrology was simultaneous with the translations. It is not the case that texts were translated and then subjected to interpretation by scholars. The process was much more fluid and dynamic. There are no other dates in the early manuscripts, and the next reference to Alcabitius is in the Speculum astronomiae from approximately 1260, which was attributed to Albertus Magnus by medieval authors.45 What is interesting about the reference is the fact that Pseudo-Albert specifically mentions the fact that the text of the Introduction contains “interpretations.” This is a revealing comment, in which Pseudo-Albert suggests two layers of interpretation: the first by the translator himself, whose job it is to render intelligible the foreign names, and later the second by a commentator or annotator.46 Although Pseudo-Albert lists other Arabic texts, it is noteworthy that he mentions the foreign terms with respect to Alcabitius, since he is explicitly pointing out the foreignness of the text and the need for interpretation. The process of interpretation and assimilation continued into later cen-

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turies. Several different pieces of evidence indicate that the Introduction was taught at universities. First, two early fourteenth-century commentaries on the text suggest a university audience. In Paris in the 1320s, John of Saxony wrote his commentary on Alcabitius four years after composing new canons to the Alfonsine Tables.47 Cecco d’Ascoli, a professor of astronomy and astrology at Bologna, wrote a commentary on the first chapter of the Introduction in the 1320s as well. The university rolls of the University of Bologna list Alcabitius in the curriculum in 1405.48 From the manuscripts themselves, there are occasionally worked out horoscope examples within the set of texts bound to the Introduction. These are rarely contained within the pages of the text of the Introduction itself, and most often appear on flyleaves or other blank folio pages. Rather than a form of self-study, the horoscope examples were likely used to illustrate particular points of astrological doctrine in the text in university settings. There are several ownership inscriptions in the manuscripts, one of which dates to the early sixteenth century. The text reads: “This is my book, Federico Delfino, which was given to me by Bartholomeus Cherubinus, a doctor [and] my friend.”49 Federico Delfino held the chair of mathematics at Padua beginning in 1520. It is difficult to determine when, precisely, master Bartholomeus gave the book to Delfino, but it is possible that this was a gift while Delfino himself was studying at university. Born in 1477, he inscribed another manuscript that he copied for himself in 1490, when he was only thirteen years old. Presumably this particular codex was for university study, since it contains several known astronomical introductions, astrological works, and astromedical texts. Unfortunately Delfino did not make many annotations in Alcabitius’s Introduction, but he did note the location of hyleg and alchocoden in the margins. Keeping this context of the university in mind, we can evaluate the marginalia and other evidence to examine whether the text continued to be read and used by astrologers beyond their student years. A reference to Johannes de Fundis’s annual prediction (iudicium) for the year 1445 at the University of Bologna indicates that the text continued to be used by practicing astrologers. In Cicogna 3747, for example, there are two hands: one makes fairly simple and straightforward remarks (such as providing definitions), and the other provides lengthier discussions. The level of complexity and competence demonstrated in the two different hands is fairly striking. The simpler hand, for example, gives a basic definition for a conjunction: a conjunction of latitude is when planets are joined by latitude, not when

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planets are joined by longitude.50 This is a very simple definition that one can imagine being noted in a university lecture. The other hand in the text, which mentions Johannes de Fundis’s prediction, has used an entire margin’s worth (left and bottom) of the folio’s space to compare different ways of calculating the ruling planet for a particular topic (such as property, marriage, wealth, etc.). The level of competence with astrological technique demonstrated by the second annotator demonstrates a familiarity with the concept that could not have been attained by a novice. I suggest that for more sophisticated discussions of this type, the annotator is using the text as a practicing astrologer, having perhaps been exposed to it as a university student. In this case, the annotator is working out various possibilities for performing different calculations. Practicing astrologers may also have used the text as a reference manual. Many of the manuscripts contain at least some subject headings next to passages that discuss differences among the planets and the houses, as well as the lots. The frequency of this practice of labeling, which appears in early manuscripts and throughout the text’s printed history, suggests that the text served as a reference tool for many individuals eager to quickly identify the relevant portion of text for their astrological calculations. These individuals were likely practicing astrologers, and this group includes physicians. Not all physicians practiced astrology, but those who did would likely have found Alcabitius useful, and adding subject headings would have guided them through the text much more swiftly.51 A few bits of evidence point to a context outside of the university where the Introduction was read. The first is from a manuscript in the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence, which does not seem to have left the church since it was used in the later fifteenth century. At the end of the Introduction, the scribe has written his name, Laurentius Silvestris, and the date 1460. Perhaps more interestingly, we find at the end of a commentary on Ptolemy’s Centiloquium another note from Laurentius, except the year was 1477 and he had become a canon of the Church of San Lorenzo.52 The last fascinating detail is that the commentary is not Haly’s, which up to this point was the most popular commentary on the text and frequently circulated with it in manuscripts. The commentary is by another Laurentius, Laurentius Bonincontrius. Laurentius Bonincontrius was a humanist poet and astrologer who was living in Florence from 1475 to 1478. It is possible that he personally gave his commentary to the astrologer-enthusiast, the canon Laurentius, in 1477. The text of the commentary is highly annotated, but it is not imme-

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diately clear that the canon Laurentius was the annotator. There are subject headings throughout which resemble the hand of the main script, but the annotations appear to be in a different hand. The annotations demonstrate a concerted effort on the part of the reader to make the text intelligible, and include several examples and explanations, along with some lengthier discussions. At the very least, we have here an example of Alcabitius being read by the young Laurentius, possibly at university but also possibly for self-study, and used later as a reference tool, as indicated by the subject headings in the text. The fact that a canon was an astrological devotee in the later fifteenth century perhaps reveals some of the tensions that began to develop in Florence among the religious community, and particularly with the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola, who was highly influential on the astrological critic Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. More relevant to our interests, however, is that Laurentius was interested in adding the contemporary commentary on Ptolemy’s Centiloquium, rather than Haly’s, to his astrological and astronomical compendium. This suggests that fifteenth-century scholars may have started to turn toward contemporaries to supply works that supplemented or even replaced Arabic authors. Conclusion From very early in the manuscript tradition, the Latin readers of Alcabitius’s Introduction were critical and engaged. They compared Arabic authors with each other and with Ptolemy and noted differences in doctrine in the margins. Their citations suggest that Arabic astrology was received with a critical enthusiasm that defined subsequent readers’ attitudes toward the Arabic tradition. In addition, the retention of Arabic terminology in Latin transliterated forms cemented the Arabic core of astrology as it was learned and practiced in the West, further highlighting the reverence and authority attributed to Arabic learning by Latin scholars. Lastly, the teaching of the Introduction at universities and its popularity outside of universities suggest that recognition of the importance of Arabic knowledge had a broad base in Latin Europe. In examining the “afterlife” of Alcabitius’s Introduction through its readers, we bear witness to the prolonged effect that a single act of translation may have on a receiving culture.53 Where there are multiple acts of translation, each with its own afterlife and history, we begin to understand

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the profound influence of the Arabic scientific and philosophical tradition on the Latin West. Whereas the practice of translation lends itself to scholarly scrutiny when considered in the context of knowledge production, as other chapters in this volume have well shown, the consequences of translation for subsequent generations of readers are equally important in understanding the development of ideas across cultures, times, and places. In the case of Alcabitius, the act of reading a translated work, even centuries after the initial translation, reveals the tension between acquiring a new knowledge framework and encountering and accommodating its cultural substratum. While I do not wish to suggest in an essentialist way that astrology in the Latin West was Arabic, the notion that the text was merely appropriated by Latin readers fails to capture the extent to which Alcabitius’s Introduction continued, over centuries of use, to maintain its Arabic character. A focus on appropriation in turn obfuscates the ways in which Latin readers themselves engaged in a process of “aspecting.”54 In his important article on the dangers of following an essentialist narrative of Arabic science, Abdelhamid I. Sabra introduces the concept of aspecting to describe “the way in which individuals in a given culture aspect another culture as they direct their gaze to the other from their own location.”55 He goes on to explain: “Aspecting in this sense is conditioned both by the interests, aspirations, and aptitudes of the aspecting individuals and by the accessible aspects of the viewed culture, that is to say, the aspects that happen to be disclosed to them by the accidents of history or by their further, determined effort.”56 In this way, the Latin readers (as individuals) are certainly influenced by their own values, interests, and needs, but they are also subject to the Arabic cultural elements accessible to them in the texts they encounter. The historical trajectory of astrology in medieval and early modern Europe, as defined by learned, individual practitioners, can thus be considered as substantially retaining its Arabic identity. Furthermore, the interpretation of the Introduction as witnessed in the marginalia, as well as the citations to Arabic authors, created for the Latin reader an encounter with the Other, despite the fact that Arabic astrology had become a staple at medieval universities and formed the core of European astrological knowledge. We might consider how marginalia reveal act(s) of appropriation of Arabic astrological knowledge by Latin readers, but this term falls short of capturing the processes through which Latin readers read, questioned, understood, commented on, and adapted astro-

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logical ideas to their own needs. The readership of Alcabitius’s Introduction, as indicated by these annotation practices, points to some subtle identity politics at play that evolved into the outspoken critiques of Arabic astrology in the sixteenth century, put forth most notably by Girolamo Cardano. The marginalia reveal that while the critics of astrology in general peppered their condemnations with attacks on Arabic astrological inventions, the Arabic astrological tradition was considered an authoritative source of knowledge for centuries after the initial translations occurred despite these critiques.

Chapter 15 The Fourteenth-Century Transformation in China’s Reception of Arabo-Persian Astronomy Dror Weil

The mid-fourteenth century was a moment of change in the history of China. The Yuan 元 dynasty (1279–1368), China’s local branch of the Mongol Empire, ceded control to the armies of Zhu Yuanzhang 朱元璋 (1328–98) and consequently saw the rise of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644).1 The significance of that moment to the history of China has received much attention in recent decades as a debate has taken place over its meaning, scope, and magnitude, as well as the specific time it occurred. The traditional portrayal of that change, which is chronicled in writings of the Ming and Qing dynasties, viewed it as a moment of rupture and restoration—the Ming restored the rule over China from the hands of the barbarians, and reembraced the heritage of its assumed Chinese forebears the Han, Tang, and Song dynasties. An alternative view that has gained currency in recent decades pointed out the continuities between the institutions and political mentalities of the Yuan and its immediate Ming successors. By focusing on the forms of accommodation of Arabo-Persian astronomical knowledge in China, this essay contributes to this discussion. As both the Yuan and early Ming courts invested in the importation of astronomical theories, methods, and texts from the Islamicate world—yet applied different forms of accommodation of such knowledge—a comparison of the two periods can shed light on some characteristics of this historical moment. This essay 262

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argues that a transformation in the form of accommodating Arabo-Persian astronomy at the Chinese court took place during the last two decades of the Hongwu reign (1380–98), almost two decades after the establishment of the Ming dynasty. Whereas under the Yuan dynasty, Arabo-Persian astronomical activities were carried out by Muslim experts, specially brought to China from other parts of the Islamicate world, and bringing with them texts in Arabic and Persian, China’s withdrawal from the Mongol Empire under the Ming dynasty signaled the need to rethink its accommodation of that branch of astronomical practice. During his early years, Zhu Yuanzhang attempted to duplicate the institutions that the Yuan had charged with carrying out Arabo-Persian astronomical activities at the court, and for that purpose, Zhu employed experts who could make use of texts in Arabic and Persian. He implemented a series of policies during the 1380s and 1390s aiming to naturalize Arabo-Persian astronomy, and to make this branch of knowledge an integral part of the larger imperial astronomical enterprise. The comparison between the two periods and their two forms of accommodating Arabo-Persian astronomy, I contend, will not only provide new ways of thinking on the Yuan-Ming transformation in terms of domestic politics and China’s engagement with its neighboring countries and peoples, but also has the potential to enrich our understanding of the complicated story of the reception of Western science in China. Several models have been proposed to theorize the processes involved in the cross-cultural transplanting of knowledge and, in particular, the universalization of knowledge and its subsequent localization. Abdelhamid I. Sabra, in his work on the universalization of Greek science and its assimilation in medieval Islam, applied the term “naturalization” to describe the process by which the Greek science was embedded in medieval Islamic works.2 Sabra’s naturalization model comprises three stages: the first includes the acquisition and translation of Greek texts into Arabic; the second, the allegiance of Muslim scholars to “a comprehensive Hellenistic view of the world”; and the third, an emergence of a local type of thought and discourse that embedded Hellenistic views and practices. Although Sabra’s model centers on the specific historical context of the appropriation of Greek science by Muslim scholars during the eighth and ninth centuries, the concept of “naturalization” and Sabra’s three-stage model can arguably be extended to describe the process of localizing Arabo-Persian astronomy in China during the 1380s and 1390s. “Naturalization” in the latter case refers to the aggregate of Ming China’s acquisition of Arabic and Persian texts and their translation into Chinese, the embedding of Arabo-Persian

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astronomical expertise within the imperial astronomical institutions, and its reestablishment as a subcategory of the local astronomical scholarship. Arabo-Persian Astronomy under the Yuan Dynasty Movement of knowledge across Asia had a long history that begins far earlier than the rise of Islam or the establishment of the Mongol Empire. Yet it is from the Yuan dynasty that ruled China (officially 1279–1368) that we find evidence for the importation of astronomical knowledge and experts from the Islamicate world to China on a significant scale, and the consequent imperial sanctioning of that knowledge.3 Under the Yuan, one of the most salient aspects of Arabo-Persian astronomy was its use of original Arabic and Persian texts, and the employment of astronomers who possessed the required literacies in these languages. The Mongol conquests in Asia and the establishment of the Yuan dynasty ushered in a new sociopolitical environment in China that facilitated the movement of a considerable number of texts and experts between the Islamicate world and China, and created an unprecedented use of Islamicate knowledge in Chinese imperial institutions. Arabic and Persian texts on the natural sciences, and particularly in the fields of astronomy and medicine, arrived at the Yuan court and were accommodated in newly established governmental agencies. The collection of knowledge played an important role under the Mongols, serving a number of political purposes. It allowed the Mongol rulers to portray themselves as universal conquerors, bringing under their rule multiple nations, languages, and civilizations. For some Mongol rulers it was the image as patrons of the sciences and arts, and preservers of ancient traditions that motivated their sponsorship of projects of knowledge collection.4 Moreover, the crossover of Mongol shamanic beliefs and the Chinese political theory of the Mandate of Heaven further directed the Mongol interest in the studies of natural phenomena. The occurrence of unpredicted and extraordinary natural phenomena could be read as Heaven’s signaling of its withdrawal of the ruler’s legitimacy.5 As a result of their shared interests, the Mongol courts and their scientific institutions created professional spaces in which exchanges of ideas and texts took place. The mobilization of populations of experts and soldiers across the empire enhanced cross-cultural contacts and generated long-lasting effects on diaspora communities across Asia. Ilkhanid research complexes, such as the Rab‘-i Rashīdī in Tabrīz and the Marāgha

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Observatory (Raṣd-i Marāgha), brought together experts and informants from China, India, and Western Asia, who exchanged information on medical and medicinal practices, astronomical modeling, histories, and languages. Similarly, service at the Yuan court brought to China experts of Arabic, Persian, Uyghur, Nestorian, and Mongol affiliations, thereby creating a highly cosmopolitan atmosphere. Upon ascending the throne in China, Kublai Khan rapidly sought Arabic and Persian speaking experts in the astral sciences (xingxue 星學) for service in the Yuan court. These experts, bringing with them technical and mathematical expertise, texts, and instruments, set the foundation for China’s institutional importation of Arabo-Persian astronomy. One of the key figures in these cross-Asian astronomical exchanges was Jamāl al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Ṭāhir b. Muḥammad al-Zaydī al-Bukhārī (fl. 1255–91).6 Jamāl al-Dīn was an astronomer in the service of Möngke Khan (r. 1251–59) and his brother, Hülegü Khan (r. 1256–65). He was instrumental in the establishment of the Marāgha Observatory, and was later sent to China at the request of Kublai Khan in order to supervise the construction of an observatory (known in Chinese sources as Huihui sitiantai 回回司天台, the Arabo-Persian Observatory) in the northern capital Shangdu 上都. He arrived at the Yuan court in 1267 equipped with texts and instruments,7 and within a few months presented the Yuan court with a calendar, titled Wannian li 萬年曆 (Ten-thousand year calendar), presumably a translation or adaptation of an Arabo-Persian Zīj.8 The observatory, which was established in 1271, was later expanded to become the Directorate of Arabo-Persian Astronomy (Huihui sitian jian 回回司天監)—an imperial agency dedicated to making astronomical observations and compiling almanacs for the Yuan court. As an imperial agency, the Directorate of Arabo-Persian Astronomy constituted a central component in the introduction of Arabo-Persian astronomical knowledge to China. The directorate employed experts in Arabo-Persian astral sciences, some of whom were newcomers from other parts of the Islamicate world, as well as various types of translators and scribes, bridging the linguistic and cultural gaps between these recent arrivals and their Chinese colleagues, and facilitating the presentation of Arabo-Persian astronomy using the conventions of Chinese bureaucratic writing. There is evidence to suggest that a great deal of the astronomical activity among these experts took place in more than one language. Jamāl al-Dīn, the chief astronomer mentioned above, who later directed the imperial cartographical project,

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for example, could not speak, read, or write Chinese, and was assisted by interpreters (tongshi 通事) to communicate with his Chinese colleagues, as well as translators to put his scholarship into written Chinese.9 The case of Ai-xue (愛薛, most probably the name ‘Īsá), a Nestorian whose linguistic skills and expertise in astronomy and medicine made him instrumental in the Yuan administration, further demonstrates the multilingual landscape at the Yuan court.10 Despite the specific functions of astronomical and astrological predictions for the Yuan court, the boundaries of scholarship associated with such knowledge were far more inclusive than those of modern astronomy. As clearly reflected in a list of Arabic and Persian works collected by the Northern Astronomical Observatory (Bei sitian tai 北司天臺) under the Imperial Bureau of Astronomy (Sitian jian 司天監), Arabo-Persian astronomical expertise included knowledge of mathematics, metaphysics, and theosophy (Persian, ḥikmat), and even history and poetry.11 The list, dated to the tenth year of the Zhiyuan 至元 period (1273), includes 22 titles of works comprising 242 parts.12 Each entry in the list has two sections: a transliteration of the original Arabo-Persian title (in most cases, an abridged title) in Chinese characters, and a representation of the subject of the work in Chinese terms. No authors’ names appear on the list, and no reference to the languages of the works. This dual representation of the titles in the list—both in Chinese characters—is significant. First, the fact that the list is written exclusively with Chinese characters suggests that these Arabic and Persian works were catalogued and deposited in the library of that Yuan astronomical institution in a fashion similar to the way Chinese works were catalogued and housed there. Second, it implies that this list of titles was made for experts who were not literate in Arabic or Persian. Moreover, the Chinese terms employed in the second part of each entry to concisely represent the subject of the work are rather peculiar and, in some cases, not fully decipherable. The term “astronomy,” for example, is represented by the Chinese term sitian 司天 (lit. “administration of the sky”) and “arithmetics” by the term suanfa 算法 (lit. “methods of calculation”). These terms suggest an honest attempt to juxtapose Arabo-Persian knowledge with the established Chinese categories and concepts. This list of titles gives a rare glimpse into the nature of Arabo-Persian knowledge and the type of Arabic and Persian texts accommodated by the Yuan astronomical bureau. The list begins with a series of titles of works on mathematics and geometry with astronomical application, such as Euclid’s

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Elements, a text titled Ḥall al-shukūk (The solutions of uncertainties) that seems to be an Arabic commentary on the Elements,13 as well as Ptolemy’s work on astronomy Almagest. It then continues with titles of works on astrology, and geomancy, calendar making, the compendium of astral constellations Ṣuwar al-Kawākib (Figures of constellations),14 and technical manuals of astrolabes and other astronomical instruments such as the one titled Ḥiyāl.15 Additional titles included in the list are of works on theosophy, alchemy, medicine, gemology, and medicine, as well a work titled Ta’rīkh (History, translated into Chinese as Zong nianhao guoming 總年 號國名 (“A summary of periods and dynasties”), and a work titled Shi‘r (Poetry).16 The use of texts in their original languages, rather than translating them, was a significant feature in the accommodation of Arabo-Persian astronomical knowledge at the Yuan court. The ability to read Arabic and Persian texts (referred to collectively in Yuan documents by the term Huihui wenzi 回回文字. Arabo-Persian scripts) was considered part of the required expertise of those dealing with Arabo-Persian astronomy. Two manuscripts, one in Persian and the other in Arabic, preserved at Bibliothèque nationale de France provide us with clues on the ways AraboPersian astronomical texts were deposited and catalogued in the Yuan astronomical institutions. The first is a manuscript—a Persian work titled Jahāndānish (Knowledge of the world) and attributed to Sharīf al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Masʿūd al-Masʿūdī (fl. ca. 1274).17 At the margins of the colorful folios of this manuscript appear the two Chinese characters tianzi 天字 followed by changing folio numbering. The second manuscript is an Arabic astronomical almanac presumably written in Tibet in 1366 and attributed to a certain al-Sanjufīnī. At the margins of this manuscript we find the characters cangzi 藏字 followed by folio numbering.18 The two pairs of Chinese characters in both manuscripts seem to represent catalogue tags commonly used in Chinese depositories.19 This cataloguing fashion suggests to me that these two original texts were once part of the libraries of Yuan, and thus gives clues on a single aspect of the mechanism by which Arabo-Persian knowledge was accommodated in Chinese astronomical institutions during that period. The scope of cooperation between experts of Arabo-Persian astronomy and their Chinese colleagues during that period is unclear. In the past, historians have speculated regarding the possible influence of Arabo-Persian astronomy on the works of Guo Shoujing 郭守敬 (1231–1316), an important astronomer at the Yuan court. It is highly likely that in the capacity of his

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work at the observatory in Beijing, and his interest in astronomical devices, Guo was familiar with the Arabo-Persian theories and methods of calculation as well as with the instruments employed in the northern observatory. The Yuan dynasty not only considerably elevated the prestige of Arabo-Persian astral knowledge in China, it also founded institutions that could accommodate this branch of imported knowledge. These official institutions housed original Arabic and Persian texts, imported from centers of scholarship around Asia, for the use by local astral experts, producing a virtual scholarly space shared by China and other parts of the Mongol Empire. Domesticating Arabo-Persian Astronomy during the Early Years of the Ming In 1368, Zhu Yuanzhang, a rebel leader and soon-to-be the first emperor of the Ming, took over the Yuan capital and subsequently united China under his rule. Zhu established his new capital in the southern city of Nanjing, a historically important metropolis and a cultural hub at the time. In formulating his policies, Zhu adopted two contradictory yet interchangeable strategies. On one hand, his rhetoric aimed to distinguish the Ming from its immediate predecessor. In order to gain legitimacy for the rule of his new dynasty, Zhu went out of his way to denounce the foreign nature of the Yuan, and establish his dynasty as the successor of the historical Han, Tang, and Song dynasties. At the same time, however, in structuring his government and policies, Zhu reproduced, to a great extent, the institutions and positions of his predecessors in the Yuan, and thus maintained stability through bureaucratic continuity.20 The first Ming emperor’s double-edged policy had an effect on the circulation of Arabo-Persian astronomy in China and the accommodation of such knowledge in the new governmental institutions. The fall of the Yuan also marked a withdrawal from the extensive sociopolitical and intellectual space that the Mongol Empire provided. This withdrawal had consequences in terms of the movement of experts, texts, and other forms of knowledge between Ming China and other parts of Asia. At the same time, the establishment of the Bureau of Astronomy in the Ming capital of Nanjing and the transfer of experts, texts, and instruments from the overrun Yuan capital revitalized institutional interest in putting Arabo-Persian astronomy to use. The power transition that followed the demise of the Yuan dynasty and the establishment of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) included taking over

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the Yuan depositories of books. In a symbolic act of imperial transition, as soon as Zhu Yuanzhang’s troops took over the Yuan capital in Beijing, they confiscated the contents of the Yuan Imperial Library, and transferred them to a newly established Imperial Library in Nanjing. Among these books, as mentioned in a number of historical records, were hundreds of Arabic and Persian works.21 This symbolic and physical transition marked the first stage in a process by which the Ming court sought to appropriate Arabo-Persian astronomical knowledge. The level of accuracy provided by Arabo-Persian techniques of astronomical measurement was indispensable for the first emperor of the Ming, who strove to demonstrate that his rule was a mandate of heaven. Hence, one of the earliest institutions Zhu Yuanzhang installed, even before capturing the Yuan capital, was the Directorate of Astrology (Taishijian 太史 監). This institution, modeled on the Astrological Commission in the Yuan government (Taishiyuan 太史院), was established in 1367 as the imperial institution in charge of astronomical prediction and the compilation of the annual imperial almanac. A year later, after unifying China, Zhu reorganized his court, dividing the responsibilities of the directorate between two new institutions: the Directorate of Astronomy (Sitian jian 司天監) and the Directorate of Arabo-Persian Astronomy (Huihui sitianjian 回回司 天監). This latter institute was in charge of devising almanacs using Arabo-Persian techniques of astronomical calculation that served as reference. They were then compared to the predictions made by the Directorate of Astronomy using traditional Chinese astronomical methods. This reorganization clearly shows the importance that the first emperor attached to Arabo-Persian astronomical methods, yet, at the same time, shows his attempt to maintain a difference between Arabo-Persian astronomy and “traditional Chinese” knowledge. To staff his new astronomical institutions, the first emperor of the Ming recruited functionaries who had served in the Yuan administration and had surrendered to the Ming. Among these recruits were Ḥaydar (Hei-deer 黑的兒), ‘Abdallāh (A-du-la 阿都剌), and Dāryūsh (Die-li-yue-shi 迭里 月實), all of whom had served as high-ranking officials in Yuan astronomical institutions. These new appointees were ordered to devise a new official calendar based on their mastery of Arabo-Persian methods.22 During the following year (1369), ‘Alī Zheng 鄭阿里, and another eleven people were summoned to the capital to serve as Astronomical Observatory officers (tiantai guan 天臺官) in the Directorate of Arabo-Persian Astronomy, and to support its astronomical activities.23

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The Directorate of Arabo-Persian Astronomy was set apart from the Directorate of Astronomy both methodologically and spatially. The latter was based within the city wall in proximity to the major institutions of the Ming court. The former, however, occupied a building outside the Jubao Gate (jubao men 聚寶門) at the southern end of the Ming capital, and its observatory was located on the nearby Jubao Mountain (jubao shan 聚寶山).24 That area included a complex of other institutions, such as the Zhongyi lou 重譯樓, a reception hall for foreign guests, and the Welcoming Guests Avenue (Laibin jie 來賓街), all located outside the Jubao Gate and providing services to foreign guests arriving at the capital. This spatial division shows once more Zhu Yuanzhang’s ambivalence toward AraboPersian astronomy. The scope of intellectual interaction between China and its western neighbors during the onset of the Ming dynasty is unclear. It is reasonable to believe that the turmoil of the mid-fourteenth century as well as the fall of the Yuan impeded the movement of people, and in particular limited the influx of astronomy experts and texts from the Islamicate world into China. We have evidence, however, as in the case of Ma-sha-yi-hei 馬沙亦黑 (see below), that Central Asian migrants were instrumental in the activities of the Directorate of Arabo-Persian Astronomy. Still, it may be argued that the overall number of people in the Ming government declined—in particular, those in the astronomical institutions who possessed the necessary linguistic skills to use Arabic and Persian texts. Translation and the Naturalization of Arabo-Persian Astronomy in the Late Fourteenth Century For more than a decade, Arabo-Persian astronomical activities under the Directorate of Arabo-Persian Astronomy were carried out using original texts in Arabic and Persian. The cooperation between that directorate and the Directorate of Astronomy was minimal, and the application of older “Chinese” methods overshadowed that of Arabo-Persian ones.25 After recognizing the advantages of the Arabo-Persian astronomical methods, the first emperor of the Ming launched in the 1380s and 1390s a series of projects and institutional reorganizations aiming to make Arabo-Persian astronomical knowledge more accessible and applicable for the larger community of imperial astronomers. In 1382, the emperor launched a translation project into Chinese of selected Arabic and Persian texts on astronomy.26 Li Chong 李翀 and Wu Bo-

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zong 吳伯宗 (1334–84), two scholars of the prestigious Hanlin Academy 翰 林院, were chosen to supervise the translation.27 They sought the assistance of two Arabic and Persian speakers, Ma-sha-yi-hei 馬沙亦黑 and Muḥammad (Ma-ha-ma 馬哈麻), who read the original texts and orally rendered the basic meaning into vernacular Chinese. The Hanlin experts then put the renditions into writing in the lofty airs of classical Chinese. The team produced translations of a number of Arabic and Persian works, the most notable of which is the translation of Kushyār b. Labbān’s astrological manual, which received the unambiguous Chinese title The Book on Arabo-Persian Astronomy (Huihui tianwen shu 回回天文書, trans. 1382).28 Additional titles of works in Chinese include Arabo-Persian Calendric Methods (Huihui lifa 回回歷法), and Arabo-Persian [Methods of Measuring] Latitude and Longitude (Huihui jingweidu 回回經緯度). It is not clear, however, whether these works were direct translations from Arabic or Persian originals (in any case, the identity of such originals is unknown), or genuine treatises in Chinese by experts trained in Arabo-Persian astronomy. Chinese works that circulated under the titles Western Predictions of Celestial Phenomena (Tianwen xiangzong xizhan 天文象宗西 占) and Computation Methods for the Seven Governors (Qizheng tuibu 七政 推步) seem to be versions of The Book on Arabo-Persian Astronomy. Interestingly, in his preface to The Book on Arabo-Persian Astronomy, Wu Bozong, the Hanlin academician who oversaw the translation project, linked the astronomical knowledge presented in the manual to its historical Islamic context. He wrote, “Muhammad and the successive generations of sages came to this world and attained the Great Way. This is clearly evident. Then, the great worthy Kūshyār [b. Labbān] came to the world and compiled this book for expounding and propagating the sublime principles. The extreme precision of his writing let future generations follow and adhere to it.”29 The translation project was abruptly stopped amid a series of violent clashes between the first emperor and scholars whom he perceived as trying to undermine his authority. Among those who were deprived of their titles and offices was Wu Bozong, the head of the translation project, who met his death in 1384.30 The political situation appears to have brought a temporary halt to the translation project, yet additional works continued to be produced in the directorate in later periods. In 1398, toward the end of Zhu’s reign, he reorganized the astronomical institutions once more and decided to abolish the Directorate of Arabo-Persian Astronomy. A Department of Arabo-Persian Calendar

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(Huihuili ke 回回曆科) was established under the Directorate of Astronomy, and was placed in charge of using Arabo-Persian methods to make astronomical predictions and produce annual almanacs. This geographical and conceptual transformation of the astronomical institution in charge of Arabo-Persian astronomy at the Ming court marks the apex of a naturalization process of that branch of astronomical scholarship. Zhu appointed two groups of functionaries to staff the newly established Department of Arabo-Persian Calendar: astronomers who were selected by examination, and astronomers whose positions were inheritable. By means of the latter group, Zhu hoped, arguably, to retain a core group of astronomers who maintained skills and unmediated apprehension of original Arabic and Persian astronomical texts. An epitaph that the first Ming emperor composed for a certain A-du-la 阿都剌 (‘Abdallāh), who served as an officer in the department, describes such a case. The epitaph suggests that ‘Abdallāh (with his cohorts) was appointed in order to preserve the generations-old Arabo-Persian astronomical methods of observation, and facilitate the imperial production of the annual almanac.31 These appointments were an additional way to make Arabo-Persian astronomy accessible to the Ming court. The Outcomes of the Naturalization and the Emergence of Huihui lifa The fourteenth century marked a transition in the ways that Arabo-Persian astronomy was accommodated in China. In a manner similar to Sabra’s description of the first two stages in the process of naturalizing Greek science by the ‘Abbasids, the first emperor of the Ming successfully created a platform for accommodating Arabo-Persian astronomy in the Ming imperial institutions through acquisition and translation of Arabic and Persian texts into Chinese and a reorganization of the imperial astronomical institutions. Although the translation project came to an end in the mid-1380s, the Department of Arabo-Persian Calendar continued to operate throughout the Ming and into the early Qing dynasty until its closure in 1657. Functionaries at the department continued to produce Chinese astronomical treatises and alamancs, such as Huihui lifa shili 回回曆法釋例 (Explanations and examples for the Arabo-Persian calendrical system,” published in the fifteenth century) and Xiyu lifa tongjing 西域曆法通徑 (Gateway to the calendrical methods of the western regions) that expounded the AraboPersian methods of astronomical prediction.

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The system of inheritable positions at the Department of Arabo-Persian Calendar ensured that descendants of the original core of experts continued to take part in the activities of the department. Many of them continued to be members of Nanjing and Beijing Islamic communities. Some even preserved a certain level of literacy in Arabic and Persian and were arguably able to make use of original astronomical texts.32 An example of such a case is Bei Lin 貝琳, who inherited the position of vice-director at the department during the Chenghua reign (1464–87). His ancestors migrated to China during the late fourteenth century, bringing with them a text on calendrical computation. The work was first translated into Chinese by Yuan Tong 元統, an astronomer at the court of the first emperor, under the title Huasuan 華算 (Chinese computation) in the 1380s. The Chinese work, however, did not receive much attention, and Bei Lin, who was concerned that his ancestors’ text would be lost, memorialized the emperor in the year 1470, asking for permission to update the text and to republish it. The work was eventually republished in 1477 and presented to the throne.33 At the same time, as a direct result of the naturalization process, a new branch of astronomical scholarship, often referred to as Huihui lifa 回回曆 法 (lit. Arabo-Persian astronomical methods, sometimes also called Huihui lixue 回回曆學, Arabo-Persian Astronomy) emerged among Chinese astronomers. Despite its title, that branch of scholarship was carried out entirely in Chinese and was regarded as a local Chinese discipline, with no relation, other than historical, to astronomical activities in other parts of the Islamicate world.34 The relaxation of restrictions on carrying out astronomical and mathematical activities outside the imperial institutions from the sixteenth century onward saw a growing interest in Huihui lifa among private scholars. Scholar-officials, such as Tang Shunzhi 唐順之 (1521–67), Zhou Shuxue 周 述學, Chen Rang 陳壤, Lei Zong 雷宗, and Yuan Huang 袁黃 (1533–1606), obtained expertise in this branch of scholarship and produced new works on related aspects.35 Although maintaining nominal and some theoretical affiliations to the original Arabo-Persian astronomy, these scholars had no reading skills in Arabic or Persian (nor are they known to have used Arabic or Persian texts), and did not attempt to account for more recent developments in the astronomical discourse in other parts of the Islamicate world. The prestige of this naturalized Chinese astronomical scholarship did not escape the sight of foreign visitors to Ming China, and thus was transmitted to other parts of East Asia. The Korean astronomers Yi Sunji 李 純之 (1406–65) and his colleague Kim Tam 金淡 (1416–64), who visited

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China during the mid-fifteenth century, acquired several Chinese works on Arabo-Persian astronomy in Beijing, and presented them to the Korean Chosŏn court.36 The arrival of the Jesuits in China in the late sixteenth century, and the updated astronomical works they presented to the Ming court greatly challenged the prestige of Arabo-Persian astronomy in China. The Jesuits were able to produce more accurate predictions, and thus eclipsed the onceacclaimed merits of the Arabo-Persian astronomy. A final blow to the accommodation of Arabo-Persian astronomy in Qing China (1644–1911) came in the aftermath of a harsh dispute in the Directorate of Astronomy between Yang Guangxian 楊光先 (1597–1669), an astronomer in the directorate and a fervid advocate of the application of Arabo-Persian astronomical knowledge, and the Jesuit missionary Adam Schall von Bell (1591–1666, known in Chinese as Yang Ruowang 楊若望). The dispute focused on the level of accuracy of the Islamic calendric computation. While the Kangxi emperor at first endorsed Yang’s claims and appointed him as the directorate director, a few years later his policies changed and brought about the closing of the Department of Arabo-Persian Calendar in 1657.37 In conclusion, the fourteenth century saw a significant transition in the ways that Arabo-Persian astronomy was accommodated and used at the Chinese court. Under the Yuan, astronomers with strong linguistic skills were able to use original Arabic and Persian astronomical texts and engage with astronomical centers in other parts of Asia. With the fall of the Yuan and the establishment of the Ming, the first emperor made efforts to find ways to preserve the Yuan astronomical knowledge apparatus while coping with China’s new sociopolitical reality. The first two decades of the Ming served as a transformative phase during which the Ming court recruited astronomers who had served the Yuan, and appropriated the repositories of knowledge of the preceding dynasty. Concerned with the limited access of the new astronomical institutions to Arabo-Persian knowledge, the first emperor launched in the 1380s a process that aimed to naturalize Arabo-Persian scholarship. This process included translation of selected Arabic and Persian texts as well as reorganization of the imperial astronomical institutions, and it allowed the court to accommodate this branch of foreign astronomical knowledge and merge it into a unified body of imperial astronomy. At the same it localized the astronomical discourse and disengaged it from developments in the field of astronomy elsewhere in the Islamicate world.

Chapter 16 Celestial Navigation The First Translational Science Pat Seed

Within two years after the first Portuguese vessel came into contact with the shores of the New World in 1500, expeditions headed by Gaspar Corte-Real and then Miguel Corte-Real set forth across the unexplored and stormy seas of both the North and South Atlantic.1 As a result of these twin expeditions, Portuguese leaders knew that more than a handful of islands and at least one huge continent lay on the other side of the Atlantic. By August 1502 Portuguese mapmakers had completed a map of the contours of two Atlantic coastlines, the very large landmass of America south of the small Spanish discoveries in the Caribbean, and a smaller territory far to the north (today the eastern coast of Canada).2 Three ships made up each expedition. All on board would risk their lives to sail thousands of miles out on wooden sailing boats that were tiny by today’s standards. They would encounter unexpected storms, calms, unexplored waters, and a completely uncharted landmass. These sailors demonstrated undeniable courage in setting forth on voyages from which no one had previously returned. However, unlike their predecessors, navigators on board these vessels grasped the science and carried instruments that no previous sailor had possessed. Both their calculations and observations had originated in the astronomy, scientific observation, and trigonometry invented by Muslims and Jews during the Golden Age of Islamic Science. 275

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These pilots had only recently come into possession of previously elite sciences and instruments because a group of Iberian scientists had transformed this immense body of complex knowledge for shipboard use. The scientists translated sophisticated instruments of astronomical observation and complex trigonometric tables into practical tools that could be used to sail anywhere in the world, even oceans no one had ever explored. Between 1430 and 1500, Jewish scientists working at the Portuguese court would translate these disciplines into the science of celestial navigation. Taking basic scientific research and transforming its findings into useful practical knowledge has come to be known in recent decades as translational science. The term “translation” began to be used in genetics during the 1980s to describe how RNA synthesized proteins, as messenger (mRNA) copied information from DNA and then “translated” it into chains of amino acids.3 During the 1990s, the term began to be used for any process of extracting scientific knowledge from its original context for use in a different setting. Around 2000 it became widely employed in actual treatment, where it signified bringing scientific research directly into the practice of medicine. Today this transfer of laboratory knowledge into a procedure or medicine to help a patient is called “bench to bedside.”4 On the Iberian Peninsula, Jewish scientists performed a parallel exercise in two distinct arenas. First, they identified the crucial trigonometric calculations, carried them out correctly to four decimal places, and placed the results in easily understood and readable tables. Next they converted a complex and easily destroyed instrument into a precise device to help minimally trained sailors navigate the world. Instead of bench to bedside, they translated from scholarship to shipboard. This early instance of translational science contained a final unusual element. While contemporary translational practice moves between two secular realms, this fifteenth-century usage drew upon expertise created largely for religious purposes, and transformed it for an entirely secular purpose. In the Islamic Golden Age, Muslim astronomers studied the heavens to determine the times of daily prayer, the beginning and ending times of fasting during Ramadan, as well as the orientation of mosques toward the Ka’aba in Mecca.5 Likewise Jewish scientists employed astronomy to determine the shifting dates of religious holidays such as Passover and Rosh Hashanah. Yet between 1400 and 1500 these scientific findings with religious aims were redirected to solve the previously intractable problem of navigating the Atlantic south of the Canary Islands. Knowledge required for this novel and successful science originated

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in kingdoms, emirates, and smaller fiefdoms of the Muslim-ruled world, where enlightened leaders and scientists for centuries had welcomed scientific innovations regardless of religious origin or language. Of most essential importance to the later development of celestial navigation was the conceptualization and calculation of trigonometric functions, central to calculating the movements of the sun, moon, planets, and stars in the sky. Scientists working under Islamic rule made prodigious strides in developing the mathematics of trigonometry.6 Scientists utilized information regardless of its language or religion of origin. In addition to incorporating Sanskrit and Greek scientific advances, they also welcomed contemporary Hebrew contributors. In sharp contrast, at the same time in northern Europe, Christians restricted access to science to their own clergy and slammed shut the very doors of its institutions of higher learning to Jews and members of other faiths. By contrast, Islamic scientists customarily encouraged collaboration with their Jewish counterparts, who in turn shared their information with Muslim colleagues. The free exchange of ideas (with allowances for occasional rivalries) permitted unprecedented progress in both mathematics and astronomy. While Arabic remained the dominant language of science, many Jews wrote in Arabic or employed Hebrew letters to write Arabic words. In addition these bilingual scientists translated many of the important Arabic texts into Hebrew, with the result that several major works of Islamic science are preserved strictly in Hebrew scripts or translations.7 In areas of the world where invaders overran Islamic political realms, scientific knowledge was sometimes lost and sometimes adopted within new regions. In one region, despite centuries-long political and religious hostilities, Christian rulers who defeated Islamic sovereigns nonetheless retained enormous respect for the latter’s scientific achievements. Beginning in 1126 and over the next century and a half, Iberian bishops and kings institutionally supported translations of Arabic-language science and philosophy into Latin and later Castilian.8 Since Jews were more likely than Muslims to be bilingual, and in some cases spoke Romance languages as well, they became the primary source of information on the Golden Age of Islamic science. One thirteenth-century Christian king in particular sought to preserve Islamic (and Jewish) mathematical and astronomical traditions and to disseminate them through translation into Castilian, Catalan, and Latin. Castilian king Alfonso X (1252–84), also known as Alfonso the Wise, sponsored a large translation effort—albeit on a lesser scale than the caliph in Baghdad, five hundred years earlier. 9 He recruited

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and paid more than sixty Jews for his translation enterprise. In addition, Alfonso named a prominent Jewish astronomer-physician, Yehuda ben Moshe ha-Kohen, to translate the Books of Astronomical Knowledge (Libros del saber de Astronomía). Perhaps the most famous translator, Isaac ibn Sid (ca. 1250), updated Arabic tables for computing the position of the Sun, Moon, and planets relative to the fixed stars for observations in the city of Toledo, beginning in 1252.10 Neither the appreciation of science nor the political tolerance of Jews and Muslims would endure forever. During the period of translation, Islamic science continued to flourish, This effort did not exclude Muslims, nor did it curtail any original research, since Muslim mathematicians and astronomers continued to produce highly innovate techniques and instruments.11 During the second half of the next century, Christian overlords of what is now Spain proved either less willing or less able to protect Jewish scientists from rising anti-Semitic elements. While Islamic scientists could and did seek refuge in surviving Muslim territories in Granada and North Africa, Jews had no such option. Eventually, pogroms in eastern Spain in 1391 killed a prominent Mallorcan astronomer and began an exodus of Jewish scientists from the region, which had become the center for Jewish astronomers and cartographers. As anti-Semitic agitation also increased in both Castile and Aragon, Portugal became a desirable haven for Jewish scientists seeking refuge. Encouraged by the toleration promoted by its monarchs, Portugal and its capital, Lisbon, stood out as a place where Jewish scientists could live in peace and tranquility at the start of the fifteenth century. The Portuguese royal family—and Prince Henry, nicknamed the Navigator, in particular—had another reason for encouraging the immigration of Jewish scientists. Trying to develop an Atlantic sea route to the goldproducing regions of western Africa (rival Spain retained an unshakable grip on the trans-Mediterranean gold trade), he began to patronize southward seafaring expeditions from the Canary Islands, largely under Portuguese control until after his death. Even with his full support, the challenges of navigating the Atlantic southward appeared intractable for decades.12 Strong tides, stretches of cloudy equatorial lulls, opposing winds, and currents along the equator as well as in the Southern Hemisphere had defeated sailors’ efforts for millennia. Multiple texts have recorded failed struggles of Greek, Phoenician, and Malian mariners to venture south of the Canary Islands.13 Departing from these islands, the Canary Current inevitably thrust vessels westward across the Atlantic. Archaeological dis-

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coveries have suggested that some voyages from Mali succeeded in reaching the northeast coast of Brazil. To this day fishing boats from Senegal sporadically turn up along the coast of Brazil, only rarely bearing survivors. Elsewhere in the world, pilots had learned to navigate in specific regions mainly by following different winds and currents until they succeeded. Using trial-and-error methods, pilots successfully traversed parts of several oceans: the central Pacific, the South China Sea, parts of the Indian Ocean, and the northern fringe of the Atlantic. Yet such haphazard processes utterly failed in the Atlantic south of the Canaries, where complex atmospheric and oceanographic challenges would require a wholly different strategy. Success only came with a method never before attempted, the translation of elite astronomical and trigonometric knowledge into the practical methods of navigation. That translation would require the active cooperation of either Jewish or Muslim illuminati, the only Europeans with sufficiently broad knowledge of subjects to tackle the multiple challenges in the Atlantic. The first predicament to be solved by astronomical calculations lay with the large tides that vessels encountered when departing on a lengthy sea voyage. Open oceans constitute the bodies of water most heavily influenced by tides. While earth’s gravity pulls oceans toward its center, the gravitational forces of the moon and the sun tug the surface of the water toward and away from the coasts.14 Hence the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans all undergo significant tidal deviations. Some of the most extreme divergences between low and high tide occur in the Atlantic. Sailors familiar only with sheltered inland seas such as the Mediterranean were unprepared for the Atlantic. In the Mediterranean, tides shifted at most by a scant twelve inches. Such minimal shifts effectively permitted ships to ignore the tides and depart or arrive safely, at any time during the sailing season. Fishermen along the edge of the North Atlantic had long realized the importance of tides and the connection existing between tides and phases of the moon. However, they could only observe tides that had already occurred, and lacked the astronomical knowledge needed to predict movements of the sun and moon to allow forecasting of tides. Being able to calculate the timing of tides off the coast of Portugal was critical, since the difference between high and low tide at Lisbon could be as much as four meters. Scientific calculations allowed caravels setting forth from Lisbon to avoid being stuck in the Tagus River, or detained by falling tides at the river’s entrance to the Atlantic, even though the

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immense variety of geological factors influencing tidal cycles had yet to be determined.15 To forecast tides required a sophisticated knowledge of the lunar cycle, an expertise long developed by both Muslim and Jewish scientists to fix religious rituals. Wider demand for this acumen for tidal predictions emerged at the start of the fourteenth century as Genoese and Venetian merchants discovered a new lucrative wool trade with Flanders and England. Unfortunately, sailing to these ports required them to traverse an area where the most extreme shifts between high and low tide in Europe occurred. In 1375, Abraham Cresques, a Jewish scientist in Mallorca predicted the timing of tides at the fourteen ports that experienced the most severe transitions, ports that lay along the coast of Brittany and through the English Channel. Despite residing more than a thousand nautical miles away, a Jewish scientist’s ability to predict the moon’s behavior in distant locations allowed him to construct the first European tide tables.16 Since Cresques accompanied his table with an explanation in Catalan, the knowledge of the process could be known by literate residents of the city. In pursuit of a journey south of the Canaries, Prince Henry’s initial steps included inviting a younger and reportedly highly talented Mallorcan Jewish astronomer to relocate to Portugal. Known only as Mestre Jaume, he would have possessed the ability (like Cresques) to create tide tables for the Portuguese coast, thus introducing predictability into fixing the appropriate dates and times of departure for seagoing vessels. Given Cresques’s ability to predict tides in far-off locations, Mestre Jaume would have also been able to forecast tides along the yet-to-be-mapped West African coast. The principal obstacle to sailing into the Atlantic south of the Canaries, however, lay in the need to fix a position exactly. Babylonian and later Greek scientists had created and theoretically understood the universal system of latitude and longitude coordinates for the heavens. Both groups knew that such numerical systems could also be useful for fixing positions on earth, but had rarely succeeded in doing so. During the Golden Era of Islamic science, al-Bīrūnī had been able to judge the longitudinal distances between a limited numbers of places by comparing a lunar eclipse’s exact start time at separate observatories. By subtracting the time between the initial moments in distinct locations, he could readily determine the longitudinal distances between them. However, such measurements were possible only in a limited number of known places, and perhaps more importantly, all firmly planted on solid ground. Yet even during the height of Islamic science no one had established an accurate means for fixing lati-

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tude or longitude everywhere, let alone far away from land.17 To quote the fourteenth-century Muslim geographer Al-Dīn Abū Al-Fidā (1273–1331), even “Ptolemy makes monstrous errors in longitude, and even has committed considerable [errors] in latitude.” He added that his fellow Arab cartographers had not managed to improve on Ptolemy’s mistakes.18 Neither extensive overland travel—such as across the Silk Road—nor conventional navigation required precision in pinpointing latitude or longitude. Given the widespread availability of stable mountains, valleys, and riverbeds, lengthy land travel proceeded without requiring precise coordinates. In the bulk of the world’s seas, boats merely followed the predictable patterns of waves and currents that bore them to their destination. But when Portugal began to push southward down the Atlantic Ocean neither winds, nor currents, nor any natural phenomena would help them. Rather all these factors appeared to conspire to thwart that goal, pushing boats back to the north—or west across the Atlantic—as they had for millennia. On the deck of a wooden caravel in the fog-shrouded Atlantic south of the Canaries, far from any coastline, with winds and currents propelling their boat in the opposite direction, sailors needed to have more than simple approximation or guesswork. They needed to have confidence that those guiding the ship knew where they were at sea and how to reach their destination. With the forces of nature arrayed against them, an entirely new approach was needed: not a better way of reading nature, but an entirely different framework of knowledge—trigonometry and astronomy. What was required was the translation of this science. In the fifteenth century, these two sciences were known only to a handful of highly educated scholars, even fewer of whom possessed the creativity to convert those sciences into solutions to the problems confronting Portugal’s southward navigation. The communities of scientists adept in both trigonometry and astronomy were either Jewish or Muslim, and in the previous century had confronted rising anti-Semitism in central and eastern Iberia. Talented Muslim astronomers and mathematicians had fled to Muslim-controlled North Africa, especially to Cairo, where they continued in their work of advancing calendrical calculations. Jewish scientists in Portugal, lacking such a refuge but sheltered by a protective royal family, began the search for mathematical and astronomical solutions to the difficulty of sailing south of the Canaries. Their second success, after improving the prediction of variation in tides, was in developing dependable estimations of longitude, relying especially on observing the moon. Among Jewish and Muslim astronomers,

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cycles of the moon had drawn particular attention. In Islam such knowledge could provide the timing of the final daily prayer and the moment for breaking fast during Ramadan. In Judaism, the first sighting of the new moon marked the start of Tishrei (first month in the Sabbath year) and the start of the day for celebrating Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah). Years of work by Islamic and Jewish scientists had established the moon’s path across the sky as the best means of determining the passage of time, especially at night. The moon’s apparent speed at moving across the heavens meant that change could be detected even in a brief period. Over the course of one hour, Jewish and Islamic astronomers had established that the moon moved approximately half a degree of longitude—or roughly the entire width of the moon itself. By continually monitoring its position, careful observers could measure the passage of daily time fairly well. For longer intervals the process became more complicated. Like the giant hand of a clock the moon travels against a face composed of a handful of bright stars and planets near its regular orbit.19 Over the course of a year, the planets such as Mercury and Mars or stars in constellations such as Aries or Leo appeared in different positions above the horizon at a starting point such as Lisbon. By knowing where the moon was in relation to those stars or planets at Lisbon, an observer could compare the distance between the midpoint of the moon and those same objects at an unknown location against their location at Lisbon, and know how far west they were from their destination. Over the decades that followed, this measure would become increasingly exact as an eminent Jewish scientist for the first time carried out the exact calculations for lunar longitude for the entire thirty-one-year lunar cycle. 20 This “moon clock,” also called the ”lunar distance model,” began to be used for navigation in the 1440s, as Portuguese ships had to contend with increasingly complicated currents on the return journey from their trips ever southward. In the decade after mariners first successfully returned from across Atlantic waters south of the Canaries, pilots discovered that they had to reach what is now 22 degrees west (Greenwich) longitude in order to make the return journey north to Lisbon. By the mid-1440s this route had been popularly renamed “the long way home,” or in Portuguese, the “volta ao largo.” Proof of the utility of this method had emerged dramatically in 1446. During an expedition to the West Coast of Africa, arrows containing an unexpectedly deadly poison killed a Portuguese landing team, consisting of the captain, pilots, and nearly all other members of the crew. The two

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cabin boys left behind to guard the ship observed with horror as one after another, their leaders collapsed either dead or dying from even slight contact with the venom. A sixteen-year-old cabin boy and his even younger companion then successfully piloted the expeditions’ ships back to Lisbon, using their rudimentary knowledge of lunar distance astronomy.21 Their success ratified the belief among Portuguese leaders and scientists that astronomical and mathematical methods would provide the best method for succeeding in navigating the Atlantic. From then on, all sailors on Atlantic voyages were required to learn basic astronomy and trigonometry often taught by Jewish scientists. Like students everywhere, they complained ceaselessly about having to take such required classes, until, of course they needed the knowledge to survive at sea. The third and most difficult problem was the measurement of latitude. According to the eminent Portuguese historian of science Luís de Albuquerque, the highest achievements of Jewish scientists working for the crown of Portugal were the inventions that transpired after Prince Henry’s death in 1460.22 Of these, the most crucial and original was the scientific determination of latitude south of the equator. Previously, nearly all of European and Asian sailing had been done in latitudes north of the equator: the Mediterranean, Red Sea, the South China Sea, today’s Indonesia, and even the navigable reaches of the western Indian Ocean lie mostly north of the equator. There were three exceptions, worldwide, where mariners had earlier found ways to navigate long distances in the Southern Hemisphere, following existing currents. A reversing current enabled north- and southward travel along much of the East African coast, a one-way South Equatorial Indian Ocean carried voyagers west to Madagascar, and a canny analysis of the slow-moving South Pacific currents allowed Polynesians to venture on long journeys. But the challenges that the Portuguese faced south of the equator were compensated by no such helpful winds or currents. Beginning with the voyages of the shadowy Lopo Gonçalves in 1473– 74,23 the Portuguese approached a territory along the West Coast of Africa, unknown to classical Greek scholarship, unfamiliar even to the legendary Arab travelers and geographers of the Middle Ages.24 They had reached territory in West Africa that few in Europe had ever even imagined existed and had no models, charts, or even local nautical traditions to fall back on. By 1470 the Portuguese monarch’s oceanic ambitions lay beyond the initial effort to reach the gold-bearing regions of West Africa and toward the possibility of sailing around the coast of Africa toward the Spice Islands. While the challenges were great, so too were the potential rewards. Sail-

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ing south of the equator, Portuguese ships could reach the often-traversed Indian Ocean—where rare spices could be readily purchased. Lusitanian kings shared another ambition: finding the lost Christian kingdom of Prester John, located somewhere in the Horn of Africa. Perhaps surprisingly, Jewish scientists shared this goal with the monarchs, for Portuguese Jewish folklore of the time held that a lost tribe of Israel—now sometimes identified as the Ethiopian Jews—was located in the same part of Africa as the Christian kingdom of Prester John.25 But the polestar was no longer visible 4 degrees north of the equator, and conventional northern hemispheric seafaring knowledge about latitude was rendered useless; nor was there an equivalent star above the southern pole.26 To determine how far south they had traveled and to know how to keep sailing in a southward direction, scientists would have translate yet another area of astronomy. Jewish astronomers shifted their attention to the star visible in both hemispheres—the sun—and employed their knowledge of its behavior to translate their science into practical knowledge. The scientific challenges to establishing accurate latitude anywhere on the earth were considerable, and fell into three separate categories. First, scientists had to create the necessary mathematical means of determining the sun’s specific position along the ecliptic for every day of every solar year.27 While this task would be feasible for a single year, the challenge for scientific accuracy was far greater. Because the sun rotates on its axis like the universe’s slowest spinning top, the sun is continually changing position relative to the stars along the ecliptic. Any exact measure would have to establish the sun’s position for every subsequent year, since those positions would have shifted yearly. In addition, the tables needed to show how to continue to calculate the sun’s relative position in the future.28 Second, they had to establish a way of correctly ascertaining local noon (i.e., the exact length of a solar day), and additionally allow sailors to measure accurately the sun’s height at exactly local noon in any corner of the globe. To this end they needed to invent an instrument capable of producing identical measurements of the sun’s noontime altitude, regardless of the social status of the user. Finally, they had to find a way of assembling these two elements so that ordinary sailors could establish latitude correctly. To establish the measurements that would predict the sun’s path in the sky along the ecliptic required intimate familiarity with trigonometry, minute shifts in celestial position of stars, the mathematics necessary to predict the precession of the ecliptic, and, not least of all, knowledge of the exact length of the tropical and solar year, a calculation requiring a

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minimum accuracy of four decimal places—that is, tens of thousandths of a degree. 29 To establish precise means of fixing latitude required familiarity with forms of mathematics and astronomy—widespread in the world of Jewish and Muslim scientists but rarely encountered outside of occasional isolated individuals in the fifteenth-century Christian world.30 Indeed, the accurately calculated tropical year was not incorporated into Christian knowledge until 1583, over a century after a Jewish scientist in Iberia had created the first scientifically accurate means of finding latitude. In 1473, the Jewish astronomer and mathematician Abraham Zacuto composed his Perpetual Almanach with mathematically correct predictions of the sun’s seasonal position in relationship to the earth.31 The second problem—measuring the position of the noonday sun—was to lead ultimately to the invention of the nautical astrolabe. This process involved finding or creating an instrument that could be used to measure the position of the noonday sun in the sky consistently and precisely. After experimenting with a number of different devices over the course of a decade (including Levi Ben Gerson’s invention, the backstaff), the Jewish scientists working for the Portuguese king settled on a model for an astrolabe, an instrument extensively studied in Iberia and neighboring Provence for several centuries. In doing so, they followed a hypothetical suggestion originally proposed by Muhammad ‘Ibn al-Saffar, one of the two major eleventh-century Iberian Muslim scientists and astrolabe designers.32 Such an instrument, however, required massive revision before it could translated into an instrument for navigation. Daytime use of the astrolabe, while infrequent, required holding the device by an outstretched arm at the waist, with a rod (the alidade) pointing to the sun as its light passed through two small holes in small squares attached to the top and bottom of the rod. This produced a small circle of light (against the shadow of the squares), which fell upon numbers. Those numbers in turn provided the height of the sun above the horizon.33 On existing astrolabes this pinhole was small, and reading the numbers against the elaborately baroque background of the conventional astrolabe easily led to errors unless the operator was extremely careful. For the astrolabe to become useful to a wider public, the pinhole needed to be enlarged and the background of the instrument required simplification, all while retaining the accuracy of the observations made by a skilled and practiced astronomer. In short, the design and engraving on the new astrolabe had to be as

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precise as that of its predecessor. On that matter there could be no compromise. The changes made to the astrolabe, sometimes mocked by elite scientists, were made to save lives of individuals. But unlike their strictly academic counterparts, nautical instrument designers were not seeking to create the most elaborate instrument, but only the most reliable, dependable, and accurate apparatus. For this, as for other translational sciences, it was not just abstract theories, but human lives that were at stake.34 We lack direct knowledge of how these decisions were carried out, since the mass of relevant documentation was destroyed by two earthquakes of magnitude 8.8 and 9.0 on November 1, 1755, and the remainder carried out to sea by the most destructive tsunami ever to strike Europe. By examining the surviving instruments in places as far-flung as Museu de Marinha in Lisbon and a South African Navy base, those of us fascinated by this mechanism have been able to deduce its evolution.35 Repurposing the astrolabe required several stages of work, beginning with simplification. In short, the broad circular astrolabe had to be simplified so that it could be used for its single most necessary function—measuring the precise height of the sun above the horizon at local noon. Stripped of all the other calculating lines and numbers, the nautical astrolabe contained only numbers measuring the sun from the horizon to directly overhead. The degrees on the astrolabe had to be inscribed with the same precision as its larger predecessor, but needed only to measure 0 to 90 degrees. These numbers were then inscribed on two opposing sides of the astrolabe—thus, the numbers had to match on both sides, providing an additional check on the reading by an ordinary sailor. A second modification altered the design of the astrolabe for use in a variety of outside environments rather than the enclosed and protected area of the observatory. Instead of a relatively lightweight, large single plate of uniform thickness, the designers of the nautical astrolabe removed four large pie-shaped wedges from the middle of the astrolabe. These excisions allowed wind to pass through the center of the astrolabe, enabling it to remain steady while an observer took a measurement outside. A further step in adapting the astrolabe for a variety of environmental conditions meant putting additional weight within the instrument itself. Placing several additional pounds within the base of the astrolabe made the instrument very heavy. With the heaviest part at the bottom, the width and weight of the instrument gradually decreased from the bottom to the

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top. Thus, from a set of uniform brass plates came a single brass plate, with extra weight carefully graduated from top to bottom, with the heaviest part steadying the astrolabe at the bottom. The method of using the nautical astrolabe was identical to using the traditional astrolabe in the daytime. The astrolabe was held out at the waist, and the pointer adjusted until the sun’s rays fell directly through the pinholes and the number of degrees identical on either side. Because of the weight of the nautical instrument, this technique became popularly called “weighing the sun.” At first, sailors were instructed to repeatedly “weigh the sun” around the time of local noon, so that they could compare readings and find the maximum height of the sun above the horizon. The third and final step in determining latitude was to determine where the sun was in the ecliptic on that day and year. For that they turned to the extraordinarily accurate tables created by Abraham Zacuto. Searching for the year and day, and moving until they found the height they had measured, sailors could determine where they were—north and south of the equator. Using the sun’s angle, and looking up the date of the solar calendar, ordinary sailors could fix their latitude anywhere on the globe.36 The earliest recorded use of an astrolabe and tables occurred in the 1480s. Diogo d’Azambuja captained the West Africa voyage of 1481, during which accurate latitudes were first fixed in that region. In 1485 José Vizinho and in 1487 Bartholomeu Dias calculated precise latitudes on land south of the equator using the tables and new astrolabe.37 One more set of modifications made it possible to use the astrolabe at sea. The new sun-measuring astrolabe, while designed to work in many weather conditions, was initially designed for use on land—it could establish the coordinates of a new place once pilots were able to disembark. The final step in developing celestial navigation was finding a way to fix latitude while on board ship. This process required maintaining the scientific precision of the new sun-oriented astrolabe while making the object both sturdy and stable enough to withstand the motion of a boat at sea, a step that involved additional weighting of the astrolabe, and more generous pieshaped passages for wind. In 1497, the Jewish astronomer Abraham Zacuto was publicly identified as creator of the first mariner’s astrolabe, ceremonially handing it over to Vasco da Gama before he set sail on his first voyage to India and back.38 While Zacuto may not have been directly responsible for the new design, he was the most eminent and widely known astronomer of his day in Por-

Figure 16.1. Portuguese astrolabe ca. 1602. Division of Medicine and Science, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

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tugal—as he continues to be known in Portugal to this day. If his presence at the ceremony achieved nothing else, it attested to the importance and accuracy of the instrument on the first voyage to India. In subsequent years, Jewish pilots and navigators sailed aboard several of the ships that voyaged to the east. When King Emanuel was coerced into requiring nominal conversions, the position of pilot and navigator continued to be held by only ostensibly converted Jews. On Cabral’s voyage to India, which led to the discovery of Brazil, the chief pilot was a converted (converso) Jewish scientist known only by his Christian nickname, Master John. Charged by the king with conducting experiments on the accuracy of various alternative instruments, “Master John” sent back a personal and amusing report to the king on the surprisingly consistent results that the nautical astrolabe provided on board all five of the expedition’s major vessels.39 Given the extensive mathematical and astronomical knowledge required to make these determinations accurately in any area of the globe—including in previously unexplored regions—it seems puzzling that such an author as Daniel Boorstin was able to assert in his classic The Discoverers that the process of discovering latitude was a simple, trivial matter.40 Starting by solving 365 trigonometric equations accurately to four decimal degrees (.0001) without the aid of a calculator does not seem “simple.” Nor does the ability to predict the precession of the equinoxes with the same precision. Such assertions of simplicity are only possible if one has not delved into the scientific background or the sources composed in Portuguese, Spanish, Arabic, and Hebrew. In addition to this linguistic obstacle there remains a persistent Anglo-centrism, which Ian Hacking aptly characterized as the “sceptered-isle versions” of history of science.41 The translation of trigonometry and astronomy into the instruments and tables originally needed simply to sail the Atlantic south of the Canaries later proved sufficient to ensure the success of Vasco da Gama’s first roundtrip voyage around Africa to the western coast of India and back. But only two decades after Da Gama’s return, the new translated science of navigation using the stars proved to have even more far-reaching effects. In the first years of the sixteenth century, an able Portuguese pilot named Fernão Magalhães (better known in English as Ferdinand Magellan) traveled to the Portuguese trading posts on the Spice Islands (the Banda chain in present-day Indonesia). While there, he took repeated measurements of the longitude of these islands and, upon return to Portugal, consulted with leading cartographers. They agreed that he was right, and

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that the longitude measurements of earlier Portuguese visitors were incorrect. The legendary Spice Islands, long sought by the Portuguese, actually lay within the longitudinal boundary of Spain’s western possessions. When an unhappy Portuguese king Emanuel I heard these reports, he ignored and tried to suppress them. Magellan, along with Portugal’s three leading cartographers, then headed to Spain, where the regent for a young Charles V greeted the news with cautious optimism. Since Magellan had calculated longitude by traveling from west to east, Spanish authorities decided that decisive proof of the accuracy of his calculations would rest with a voyage never before undertaken—heading to the Spice Islands by sailing in the opposite direction. Using the techniques of the translated science of celestial navigation created in Portugal, Magellan (Magalhães ) took measurements and consulted accompanying charts that were so accurate that they would allow an expedition to sail from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern Hemisphere and then back to the Northern Hemisphere again. While the Atlantic part of the voyage followed established Portuguese routes, his ability to navigate from the tip of South America across the equator meant that he had to understand what we now call the Coriolis effect—the counterclockwise motion of winds and currents in the Southern Hemisphere and their opposite movement in the Northern Hemisphere. In addition, the techniques of the lunar distance model for longitude allowed him to judge accurately the width of the Pacific, and confirm, as he had anticipated, that Portuguese possessions lay within the eastern longitudinal boundary of the Spanish sphere of influence established in the Treaty of Tordesillas. The king of Portugal unhappily had to pay the king of Spain a large amount of money to hold on to the Spice Islands, because Magellan’s readings of the longitudinal boundary between Spain and Portugal—on the other side of the earth and all based on a translated science—had proved correct. The Jewish scientists of Iberia had not merely invented a way to sail the South Atlantic, they had translated astronomy and trigonometry into a global science that had enabled humans, for the first time in history, to sail around the earth. Following the successes of Da Gama and others, all of Portugal’s competitors soon copied or stole copies of the instruments and tables on the Portuguese translational science.42 Some bribed sailors and cartographers to teach them how to use this new knowledge.43 Jewish scientists had successfully translated astronomy and trigonometry into readily accessible means for determining latitude and longitude everywhere.

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Their legacy would prove to be enduring. For latitude, although instruments superior in “weighing the sun” began to replace the astrolabe after a century, the same scientific principles remained at the core of determining latitude for more than three centuries. The world’s oceangoing ships, including those encircling the globe, used the combination of tables and measurements of solar noon to define latitude around the world until the advent of geopositioning satellites in the late twentieth century. For longitude, using the moon as a clock also continued to be the principal method of calculation until the early years of the twentieth century. (The U.S. Nautical Almanac only ceased publishing the necessary tables in 1906.) In the hands of a skilled observer such as James Cook, the lunar distance method allowed him to sail more than 12,000 nautical miles from London, and place the coast of New Zealand’s South Island only 18 miles to the east of its actual location.44 Iberian scientists of the time expressed dissatisfaction with their inability to match the scientific precision in longitude with their achievements with latitude. João de Castro, Portugal’s only prominent Christian astronomer, correctly declared in 1540 that clocks were the only way to solve the longitude problem: the clocks produced at the time, he noted, failed to meet the necessary standards of scientific accuracy.45 In the meantime, the Portuguese and other global navigators would continue to use astronomical calculations to estimate time, and successfully sail the world over until the beginning of the twentieth century. The moon clock did not produce João de Castro’s desired scientific accuracy, but it succeeded quite well for four and a half centuries. Thus the elite sciences of trigonometry and astronomy would be translated into practices in circumstances in which human lives were at risk, and produce knowledge of a new world, new seas, and new stars.

NOTES

Introduction. Knowledge in Translation 1. In addition, we treat the study of translation as a tool for analysis, contributing to understanding the full range of patterns of communication and the efforts to overcome multiple obstacles to communication. 2. These are literal translations—connections across languages and their scripts— but also include metaphoric translation of cultural practices. 3. Scott Montgomery, Science in Translation: Movements of Knowledge through Cultures and Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 13. 4. Michael H. Shank and David C. Lindberg, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 2: Medieval Science, ed. David C. Lindberg and Michael H. Shank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 26. The same volume includes a chapter on the organization of knowledge by Joan Cadden, a chapter on translation of Greek and Islamic science to Latin Christendom, and a chapter on geography by David Woodward. Other chapters in the volume address translation, the organization of knowledge, geography, medicine, and astronomy. 5. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston, “Introduction: The Age of the New,” The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3: Early Modern Science, ed. Park and Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 2–3. 6. Charles Burnett, “The Transmission of Science and Philosophy,” in Cambridge World History, vol. 5: Expanding Webs of Exchange and Conflict, 500 CE–1500 CE, ed. Benjamin Z. Kedar and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, 339–58 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 345–48. 293

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7. The concise introduction to the volume notes the many topics to be addressed in this era but makes clear that the primary emphases will be on empire and political economy. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge World History, vol. 6, part 1, ed. Jerry H. Bentley, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, 1–23 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 8. Neither endogenous nor exogenous interpretations are posed as formal dichotomies in either literature, but the practical contrast in approaches becomes evident to the reader. 9. Park and Daston ask, “Where is the Scientific Revolution? Our avoidance of the phrase is intentional.” Instead, they comment briefly on “the mythology of the Scientific Revolution.” Park and Daston, “Introduction,” 12, 15–16. 10. George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); Margaret Meserve, Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture:  The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ʻAbbāsid Society (2nd–4th/8th–10th Centuries) (London: Routledge, 1998); Pamela Long, Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400–1600 (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, ca. 2011). Among world historians, Janet L. Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony emphasizes the demonstration of widespread commercial exchange before the modern period, without trying to explain any later transition. Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A. D. 1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 11. In an era of discovery that brought new information on the Americas and on classical texts, Macchiavelli expressed interest only in the latter, while Guicchiardini focused on the implications of the former. Kenneth Bartlett, “Burckhardt’s Humanist Myopia: Machiavelli, Guicciardini and the Wider World,” Scripta Mediterranea 16–17 (1995–96), 17–30. 12. David Damrosch, in an overview of world literature, described his concern as “with tracing what is lost and what is gained in translation, looking at the intertwined shifts of language, era, region, religion, social status, and literary context that a work can incur as it moves from its point of origin out into a new cultural sphere.” Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 34. 13. Apter describes “a zone of critical engagement that connects the ‘l’ and the ‘n’ of transLation and transNation.” Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 5. 14. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, 253–63 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 15. Damrosch, What Is World Literature? 147–205. 16. Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013). 17. Journals and monographs in world history appear overwhelmingly in English, though there are also significant publications in Chinese and German. Textbooks appear in multiple languages. Historians use many languages in research but carry on little discourse about multilingualism and translation in analysis at the level of world historiography. The contrast with literary studies is striking.

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18. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), xxv. 19. Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Alexander Beecroft, An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day (London: Verso, 2015). 20. On Persian language in the Mongol era, see Roxann Prazniak (ch. 13 in this volume). On a parallel example for Turkish influence in India, see Sheldon Pollock “Ramayana and Political Imagination in India,” Journal of Asian Studies 52 (1993), 261–97. 21. Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Scientific Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, Seventeenth–Nineteenth Centuries (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 21. 22. Our standpoint in this volume will be to assume that Eurocentrism in historical interpretation is a known factor, and that techniques can be developed to address it. Our task is to focus on how to use the contemporary tools of history of science and world history to interpret scientific communication across language frontiers. Of course, power and hegemony were present throughout the medieval world, but the ideology of civilizational hierarchy was not firmly established until the nineteenth century. 23. Fa-ti Fan, “The Global Turn in the History of Science,” East Asian Science, Technology and Society 6 (2012), 249–58; Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Peter Galison, “Trading with the Enemy,” in Trading Zones and Interactional Expertise: Creating New Kinds of Collaboration, ed. Michael E. Gorman, 25–52 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010); Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991), 33–40. In another variation, the term “exchange of knowledge” was developed for exploring exchanges including hierarchical relations (colonizer and indigenous, free and slave) and the contrast of state and civil society in exchanging knowledge across the lines of social encounters. See, for instance, Patrick Manning, “Building Global Perspectives in History of Science: The Era from 1750 to 1850,” in Global Scientific Practice in an Age of Revolutions, 1750–1850, ed. Patrick Manning and Daniel Rood, 1–18 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), 8–16. 24. Galison argues further for an “intercalated” situation, in which scientists bring together varying traditions that become linked without losing their character, and for “pidgin languages” as vehicles for scientific communication across these boundaries. Peter Galison, “Trading Zone: Coordinating Action and Belief,” in The Science Studies Reader, ed. Mario Biagioli, 137–60 (New York: Routledge, 1999). Pratt hints effectively at such complexities with her notion of the “contact zone.” Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone.” 25. Sujit Sivasundaram, “On Methods, Questions, and Theory,” Isis 101, no. 1 (2010), 146–58. Bernard S. Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), 56. 26. A related issue may be emphasized in world history, where the term “connection” has been widely adopted to describe interaction and change at the global level. Critics of “connection,” to the degree that they seek to displace it as a term of analysis, might do better to set it in the context of a wider range of dynamics of global interaction, Along this line, see the argument of Sebastian Conrad that adoption of new clock

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technology in Japan depended not just on a connection with European technology but also on an appropriate social situation. Sebastian Conrad, What Is Global History? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 68–69. 27. Claude Markovits, Jacques Pouchepadass, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam applied the term “circulation” in 2003; Subrahmanyam used it earlier in an essay linking it to “connection.” In another lineage of the term “connection,” Manning (2003) expanded it at length, drawing on inspiration from Crosby (1986). Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997), 735–62; Claude Markovits, Jacques Pouchepadass, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Introduction: Circulation and Society under Colonial Rule,” in Society and Circulation: Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia, 1750– 1950, ed. Claude Markovits, Jacques Pouchepadass and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, 1–22 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003); Patrick Manning, Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 3, 65–66, 280–81; Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). More recently, Duara emphasizes “circulation” in a world historical interpretation. Prasenjit Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 81. 28. In an early and valuable use of metaphors in exploring the history of science, Hugh Kearney distinguished organic, mysterious, and mechanical images underlying three traditions of early modern science. Hugh Kearney, Science and Change, 1500–1700 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971). 29. The explanandum (that which is to be explained) and explanans (that which conveys the explanation). 30. Subrahmanyam has suggested an alternative narrative of the early modern world, focusing on connections brought by the spread of myths. Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories.” 31. Joel Mokyr’s approach to technology in history focused on the most advanced technologies, while the approach of Arnold Pacey emphasized the interplay of varying levels of technology. Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Growth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Pacey, Technology and World Civilization: A Thousand-Year History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). 32. In addition, we may rely on translation not only as an interpretive framework but also as a methodological tool—a means to explore other sources of change. Chapter 1. The Geographical Concept of the Catalan mappamundi This essay is an abridged version of a chapter in my study on the professional and intellectual profile of Elisha Cresques, the creator of the Catalan mappamundi, “Books and Maps in Fourteenth-Century Majorca: The Intellectual Profile of Elisha ben Abraham Cresques,” in preparation. This project was made possible by a grant from the Israeli Science Foundation, no. 122/12, and the support of the Alexander von Humboldt professorship (since 2015).

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1. Patrick Gautier Dalché, Carte marine et portulan au XIIe siècle: le Liber de existencia riveriarum et forma maris nostri mediterranei (Pise, ca. 1200) (Rome: École française de Rome, 1995). 2. Bibliothèque nationale de France, cod. Esp. 30; accessed July 2016, http://gallica. bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b55002481n.r=L%27atlas%20catalan; for the most recent facsimile edition, see Gabriel Llompart i Moragues, Ramon Pujades i Bataller, and Julio Samsó Moya, eds., El món i els dies: L’Atles Català (Barcelona: Enciclopèdia Catalana, 2005); this and earlier editions offer detailed descriptions of the map contextualizing it within the general discourse on medieval mapmaking and lists of toponyms with attempts to determine the sources. The name “Catalan mappamundi,” or “Catalan Atlas” is not very happily chosen, as the chart does not belong to the medieval mappamundi tradition, nor is it an atlas; it is also not exactly “Catalan”; I shall address the problem of nomenclature in more detail in the introduction to my forthcoming book; for now I stick to the commonly used name in order to avoid confusion. 3. Former Sassoon collection, MS 368; David S. Sassoon, Ohel Dawid: Descriptive Catalogue of the Hebrew and Samaritan Manuscripts in the Sassoon Library, London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, and London: Humphrey Milford, 1932), 1:6–14. 4. Jaume Riera i Sans, “Cresques Abraham, judío de Mallorca, maestro de mapamundis y de brújulas,” in El Atlas Catalán de Cresques Abraham, ed. Gabriel Llompart i Moragues et al.,14–22 (Barcelona: Diáfora, 1975), discusses the documentary evidence in great detail; for a brief biographic sketch putting the documentary evidence into tandem with information that can be gained from the Farhi Codex, see Katrin Kogman-Appel, “Observations on the Work of Elisha ben Abraham Cresques,” Ars Judaica 10 (2014), 27–36, with references to full publications of the documents. 5. Riera i Sans, “Cresques Abraham, judío de Mallorca,” 22; Gabriel Llompart i Moragues and Joana M. Palou, “Apunts iconografics des del port de Mallorca,” in Cartografia Mallorquina, ed. Augustín Hernando et al., 75–87 (Barcelona: Diputació de Barcelona, 1995); and more recently Ramon J. Pujades i Bataller, Les cartes portolanes: la representació medieval d’una mar solcada (Barcelona: Lunwerg, 2007) with an English translation of Pujades’s text, 487. 6. Katrin Kogman-Appel, “The Scholarly Interests of a Scribe and Mapmaker in Fourteenth-Century Mallorca: Elisha ben Abraham Bevenisti Cresques,” in The Hebrew Book in the Western Mediterranean: 13th to 16th Centuries, ed. Javier del Barco, 148–81 (Leiden: Brill, 2015). 7. Literature on medieval mappaemundi is too vast to be listed here; for an overview, see David Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” in History of Cartography, ed. John Brian Harley and David Woodward, 1:286–370 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987–2007). 8. Literature on this genre, which visualized nautical information collected in portolani (books about ports and other nautical information) into maps, is likewise very rich; for an overview, see Tony Campbell, “Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500,” in Harley and Woodward, History of Cartography, 1:371–463; see also Pujades i Bataller, Les cartes portolanes. 9. How persistent this view of the Christian ecumene was still in the fourteenth

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century becomes evident from Sylvia Tomasch’s reading of the Canterbury Tales, “Mappae Mundi and ‘The Knight’s Tale’: The Geography of Power, the Technology of Control,” in Literature and Technology, ed. Mark L. Greenberg and L. Schachterle, 66– 68. Research in Technology Studies 5 (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1992). 10. Such a link was briefly suggested in earlier scholarship, but without any discussion of the implications of such an association, see, for example, Ingrid Baumgärtner, “Weltbild und Empirie: Die Erweiterung des kartographischen Weltbilds durch die Asienreisen des späten Mittelalters,” in Geschichte und historisches Lernen: Jochen Huhn zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Gerhard Henke-Bockschatz, 11–48 (Kassel: Jenior und Pressler, 1995), 29, who links that observation generally to the prolonged Islamic presence in Majorca. 11. Patrick Gautier Dalché, La Géographie de Ptolémée en Occident (IVe–XVie siècle) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), arguing that that the preference for conceptual cartographic concepts has not necessarily much to do with the Geographia being available to scientists or not. 12. For some background on the Arabic reception of Ptolemy, see Ahmet T. Karamustafa, “Introduction to Islamic Maps,” in Harley and Woodward, History of Cartography, 2:ch. 1. 13. For some background, see Y. Tzvi Langermann, Ibn al Haytham’s On the Configuration of the World (New York: Garland, 1990). 14. Albert Van Helden, Measuring the Universe: Cosmic Dimensions from Aristarchus to Halley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 29–31; see also Fuat Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, vol. 6: Astronomie bis ca. 430 H. (Leiden: Brill, 1978), 149–51; al-Farghani’s work was never edited and is better known in modern scholarship through its early modern Latin versions than in the Arabic original. 15. Juliane Lay, “L’Abrégé de l’Almageste: un inédit d’Averroès en version hébraïque,” Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 6, no. 1 (1996), 23–61. 16. Bodleian Library, MS Arab. c. 90; Yossef Rapoport and Emilie Savage-Smith, eds. and trans., An Eleventh-Century Egyptian Guide to the Universe: The Book of Curiosities (Leiden: Brill, 2014); see also accessed December 2015, http://cosmos.bodley .ox.ac.uk/hms/home.php; this text includes sections on astronomy and geography, the latter, according to the anonymous authors, is based on the Geographia, fol. 22r, Rapoport and Savage-Smith, Eleventh-Century Egyptian Guide, 413, from which it borrows only the descriptive, not the scientific and mathematical aspects. 17. For background, see S. Maqbul Ahmad, “The Cartography of al-Sharif al-Idrisi,” in Harley and Woodward, History of Cartography, 2:156–72. 18. Raphael Lassary, ed., Sefer Tsurat ha’arets (Jerusalem: Makhon letekhuna veqiddush hehaddash, 2006). 19. Shlomo Sela, Abraham Ibn Ezra and the Rise of Medieval Hebrew Science (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 16, 238–322. 20. J. Lennart Berggren and Alexander Jones, eds. and trans. Ptolemy’s Geography: An Annotated Translation of the Theoretical Chapters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), bk. 1:7, 64–66; Gerald J. Toomer, ed. and trans., Ptolemy’s Almagest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), bk. 2, 75–77. 21. Known as the “Cotton Map,” it survived in Cotton MS Tiberius B.V., fol. 56v, ac-

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cessed July 2016, http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/unvbrit/a/001cottibb00005 u00056v00.html; for some notes on his oblong shape, see Gautier Dalché, La Géographie de Ptolemée, 90. 22. Gerald R. Tibbetts, “The Beginnings of a Cartographic Tradition,” in Harley and Woodward, History of Cartography, 2:95; Alfred Stückelberger and Florian Mittenhuber, Klaudios Ptolemaios: Handbuch der Geographie, Ergänzungsband mit einer Edition des Kanons bedeutender Städte (Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 2006), 339 (in a contribution by Mittenhuber and Celâl Sengör); Karen Pinto, Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 15, suggested that it may have been a globe. 23. For some background on Islamic non-Ptolemaic maps, see Gerald R. Tibbetts, “The Balkhi School of Geographers,” in Harley and Woodward, History of Cartography, 2:108–55; the literature so far often attributes these maps to the “Balkhi School,” a construct that was recently questioned by Pinto, Medieval Islamic Maps (2016), 3; in chapters 5 and 6 Pinto sheds doubt on the assumption that this scheme is primarily rooted in the Greco-Roman tradition, as often suggested, and discusses a whole range of different sources; Emilie Savage-Smith, “Memory and Maps,” in Culture and Memory in Medieval Islam: Essays in Honour of Wilferd Madelung, ed. Farhad Daftary and Josef Meri, 109–27 (London: Tauris, 2003), discusses these maps, particularly the regional ones, as some sort of diagrams to accompany itineraries and memory aids. 24. Gerald R. Tibbetts, “Later Cartographic Developments,” in Harley and Woodward, History of Cartography, 2:138; according to Tibbetts, Ibn Hawqal was the only geographer of the Balkhi School who owed a debt to Ptolemy. 25. Yossef Rapoport and Emilie Savage-Smith, “The Book of Curiosities and a Unique Map of the World,” in Cartography in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Fresh Perspectives, New Methods, ed. Richard J. A. Talbert and Richard W. Unger, 121–39 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 127. 26. Ahmad, “Cartography of al-Sharif al-Idrisi,” 159; judging solely from al-Idrisi’s evidence, earlier historiography of cartography considered the rectangular concept extremely rare: Evelyn Edson, Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed Their World (London: British Library, 1999), 9; Tibbetts, “Beginnings,” 106–7; however, the above-mentioned research by Rapoport and Savage-Smith about the Book of Curiosities offers fresh insight into this question. 27. Ahmad, “Cartography of al-Sharif al-Idrisi,” 159n33–34. 28. For al-Idrisi’s text, see Allessio Bombaci, Umberto Rizzitano Rubinacci, and Laura Veccia Vaglieri, eds., Opus geographicum, sive “Liber ad eorum delectationem qui terras peragrare studeant,” (Naples: Istituto universitario orientale di Napoli, Istituto italiano per il medio ed estremo oriente, 1970–76), 9 pts; for a French version, see P. Amédée Jaubert, ed. and trans., Géographie d’Édrisi traduite de l’arabe en français d’après deux manuscrits de la Bibliothèque du roi et accompagnée de notes (Paris: L’imprimerie royale, 1836–40), xix; we do not know which of the Arabic versions or paraphrases he used. 29. Several copies of al-Idrisi’s text have come down to us, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, cod. Arabe 2221, accessed January 2016, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/ btv1b52000446t/f2.image.r=2221; even though this manuscript is not preserved very

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well, I used it for the cartographic material because it seems most relevant for Elisha’s cultural milieu; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Pococke 375, sixteenth century, accessed January 2016, http://bodley30.bodley.ox.ac.uk:8180/luna/servlet/view/all/what/MS.%20 Pococke%20375?q=LIMIT:%20ODLodl~29~29,ODLodl~7~7,ODLodl~6~6,ODLodl ~14~14,ODLodl~8~8,ODLodl~23~23,ODLodl~1~1,ODLodl~24~24&os=0; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Greaves 42 from the fifteenth century (not complete); accessed January 2016, http://bodley30.bodley.ox.ac.uk:8180/luna/servlet/view/search?q=Shelf mark=%22MS.+Greaves+42%22&os=0; the sectional maps of four of the manuscripts were published in full by Konrad Miller, Weltkarte des Arabers Idrisi vom Jahre 1154 in drei Teilen (Stuttgart: Konrad Miller, 1928); another text by al-Idrisi, Uns al-muhaj wa-rawd al-faraj [Intimacy of souls and gardens of pleasure], contains seventy-three regional maps: Konrad Miller, Die kleine Idrisikarte vom Jahr 1192 n. Chr. (Stuttgart: Konrad Miller, 1926); for a modern composite based on Miller’s assumption that the regional maps do reflect the appearance of Roger’s silver map, see accessed December 2015, http://www.loc.gov/item/2007626789/; on both concepts, al-Idrisi’s regional maps and the oblong map in the Book of Curiosities, see also Pinto, Medieval Islamic Maps (2016), 25, stating that they should be approached as exceptions. 30. A first overview was offered by Charles Homer Haskins, Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), ch. 9; followed by the works of Marie-Thérèse d’Alverny, see, for example, “Translations and Translators,” in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable, 421–62 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982) ; repr. in La Transmission des textes philosophiques et scientifiques au Moyen Age, ed. Charles Burnett (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1994), ch. 2; Charles Burnett, “The Translation Activity in Medieval Spain,” in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, 1036–58 (Leiden: Brill, 1994). 31. Introduction to the Phenomena, bk. 16, 3–5, for the English version, see James Evans and J. Lennart Berggren, eds. and trans., Geminos’s Introduction to the Phenomena: A Translation and Study of a Hellenistic Survey of Astronomy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 211; very little is known of Geminos’s life; it is likely that he was active in the first century BCE, see Evans and Berggren, Geminos’s Introduction, 15–22. 32. Evans and Berggren, Geminos’s Introduction, 8–10. 33. Evans and Berggren, Geminos’s Introduction, 102–5. 34. Sefer hokhmat hatekhunah haqatsar lebetalmius [Abridged version of Ptolemy’s Almagest]; this text was never printed. For fourteen- and fifteenth-century Sefardi manuscripts, see Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, cod. Hébr. 1027, fol. 1–56v, accessed September 2015, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b9064671b.r=1027.langEN; another copy of Geminos’s text detached from the Almagest appears in Mantua, Biblioteca Teresiana, ms. 4, fol. 1–26r, accessed January 2016, http://www.adacta.fi.it/digi talib/teresiana3/ebraici_gruppo.php?op=ebra&cata=ebraici&gruppo=CME_001_030; I used the Mantua copy; the cited section appears on fol. 19v; the expression for Africa appears in the abbreviation “su. (‫)סוי‬,” perhaps “Syria” confused with Libya. 35. There is no scientific edition of this version either; for a discussion of the manuscript evidence, see Mauro Zonta, “La tradizione ebraica dell’Algesto di Tolomeo,” Henoch 15 (1993), 325–50, who assumes that Anatoli used both an Arabic and a Latin

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source for his translation; see also more recently a list of translations, Zonta, “Medieval Hebrew Translation of Philosophical and Scientific Texts: A Chronological Table,” in Science in Medieval Jewish Cultures, ed. Gad Freudenthal, ch. 2 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); in general on translations into Hebrew, see Bernhard R. Goldstein, “Astronomy among Jews in the Middle Ages,” in Freudenthal, Science, 136–46; José Chabás, “Interactions between Jewish and Christian Astronomers in the Iberian Peninsula,” in Freudenthal, Science, 147–54. 36. For some details, see Charles Burnett, “The Coherence of the Arabic-Latin Translation Programme in Toledo in the Twelfth Century,” Science in Context 14 (2001), 259. 37. For a list of manuscripts, see Langermann, Ibn al Haytham’s On the Configuration, 34–36; this volume contains a critical edition and translation of Ibn al-Haytham’s text; there is no critical edition of the Hebrew version. 38. Goldstein, “Astronomy among Jews.” 39. Lay, “L’Abrégé de l’Almageste.” 40. Kogman-Appel, “Books and Maps,” ch. 3–4. 41. Olaf Pedersen, A Survey of the Almagest: With Annotation and New Commentary by Alexander Jones (New York: Springer, 2011; annotated 2nd edition of the first publication Odense: Odense University Press, 1974), 15–18. d’Alverny, “Translations,” 457. 42. Burnett, “Coherence of the Arabic-Latin Translation Programme,” 253–54. 43. Charles Burnett, “The Institutional Context of Arabic-Latin Translations of the Middle Ages: A Reassessment of the ‘School of Toledo,’” in The Vocabulary of Teaching and Research between the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Olga Weijers, 214–35 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995); see also Burnett, “Coherence of the Arabic-Latin Translation Programme”; the idea of a Toledan “school” was first questioned by Danielle Jacquart, “L’école des traductuers,” in Tolède, XIIe–XIIIe siècles, Musulman, chrétiens et juifs: Le savoir et la tolerance, ed. Louis Cardaillac, 177–91 (Paris: Autrement, 1991); it was through this channel that Roger Bacon gained information about projection methods; see Amanda Power, “The Cosmographical Imagination of Roger Bacon,” in Mapping Medieval Geographies: Cartography and Geographical Thought in the Latin West and Beyond: 300–1600, ed. Keith Lilley, 83–99 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), who argues that Bacon “was of the first generation in the Latin West that had available to them the bulk of the newly translated Greek and Arabic texts touching on the subject,” 88. 44. Abraham ibn Ezra is occasionally referred to as Abraham Judaeus; this Abraham, however, was a contemporary of Alphonse and lived in the thirteenth century; for some remarks on the text, see Gautier Dalché, Géographie, 111. 45. Langermann, Ibn al Haytham’s On the Configuration, 40–41. 46. For al-Farghani’s text, see Muhamedis Alfragani: Arabis chronologica et astronomica, ed. Iacobo Christmanno, printed in Frankfurt in 1590, p. 2v; Ibn al-Haytham’s text came down to us in only one manuscript; for details, see Langermann, Ibn al Haytham’s On the Configuration, 41. 47. The following “statistics” are based on the catalogue of microfilmed Hebrew manuscripts at the National Library of Israel, accessed December 2015, http://aleph.nli .org.il/F/?func=file&file_name=find-b&local_base=nnlmss. 48. Three others originated in Ashkenaz, three in Byzantium, seven in Italy, and six

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in the Middle East; three more are of uncertain provenance. Of those that were written in Italy or the Middle East, some may have come from a Sefardi cultural ambience. 49. Documents by notary Nicolas Prohom P-139, fols. 57–62; 93–196; these lists include 149 and 156 titles, respectively, and offer some indication of the size of an erudite Sefardi Jew’s private collection; they were published several times, the most recent discussion being Jocelyn N. Hillgarth, Readers and Books in Majorca 1229–1550 (Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la recherché scientifique, 1991), vol. 2, no. 96. 50. For a more recent identification of the titles, see Hillgarth, Readers and Books, “Index III,” compiled by Frank Talmadge and Libby Garshowitz, 2:997–1003. 51. Hillgarth, Readers and Books, vol. 2, doc. 96, B, no. 64; for some background, especially on the attribution of this work to Ibn Ezra, see Sela, Abraham Ibn Ezra, 69–75. 52. Since Ibn Rushd’s rendering of Almagest was also called qitsur almagesti [Abridged version of the Almagest] there is a possibility that this is the work that the title cotzar refers to in Mosconi’s inventory. However, Ibn Rushd’s versions do not include the chapter on geography; on Ibn Rushed’s text, see Lay, “L’Abrégé de l’Almageste”; for the possibility that cotzar means qitsur, see Hillgarth, Readers and Books, “Index III.” 53. That Mosconi’s library may have had an influence on Elisha’s cartographic knowledge was suggested in 1947 in a brief remark by Gonzalo de Reparaz Ruiz, “L’activité maritime et commercial du royaume d’Aragon au XII siècle et son influence sur le développement de l’école cartographique de Majorque,” Bulletin hispanique 49 (1947), 449; this argument will be further developed in my forthcoming study, “Books and Maps,” ch. 2. 54. Avriel Bar-Levav, “The Archaeology of Hidden Libraries in Medieval and Modern Jewish Culture” (in Hebrew), in Ut videant et contingent: Essays on Pilgrimage and Sacred Space in Honour of Ora Limor, ed. Yitzhak Hen and Iris Shagrir, 297–320 (Ra‘anana: The Open University of Israel, 2011), 306–8; for further background on Jewish libraries in Iberia, see also Joseph Hacker, “Jewish Book Owners and Their Libraries in the Iberian Peninsula, Fourteenth-Fifteenth Centuries,” in The Late Medieval Hebrew Book in the Western Mediterranean: Hebrew Manuscripts and Incunabula in Context, ed. Javier del Barco, 70–104 (Leiden: Brill, 2015). 55. Riera i Sans, “Cresques Abraham, judío de Mallorca,” 14–15. 56. See especially work by Marcia Kupfer, for example, “Medieval World Maps: Embedded Images, Interpretive Frames,” Word and Image 10, no. 3 (1994), 262–89; and more recently Kupfer, “Reflections in the Ebstorf Map: Cartography, Theology and dilectio speculationis,” in Lilley, Mapping Medieval Geographies, 100–126, esp. 118–26 with specific reference to the use of maps by Hugh of St. Victor; for some brief notes on different functions, see also Edson, Mapping Time and Space, 14–15. Chapter 2. Interpretation, Intention, and Impact This chapter is a part of the author’s ongoing work on Islamo-Christian Cartography. The term “Islamo-Christian” comes from one of Richard Bulliet’s many seminal contributions to the field. Richard W. Bulliet, The Case of Islamo-Christian Civilization (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). The author is working on a book-length study on “Islamo-Christian Cartographic Connections,” of which the maps discussed

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in this chapter are but a few of a number of examples. The author is grateful to Ainoa Castro, Richard Bulliet, Andrew Kurt, and Ramzi Roughi for their insights on the BNE Ar. T-O map and to G. A. Loud, Jeremy Johns, and Alex Metcalfe for assistance with the Norman end. 1. Abbreviated to the acronym KMMS on the basis of the title of the genre’s most widely disseminated version: Iṣṭakhrī’s Kitāb al-masālik wa-al-mamālik (KMM) [Book of routes and realms]. The “S” appended to the acronym stands for ṣūrat (“picture” in Arabic)—that is, those KMM geographical manuscripts that are accompanied by map images. For further details, see discussion later in this chapter and for a more extensive understanding, refer to Karen Pinto, Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 2. Evelyn Edson and Emilie Savage-Smith attempted to straddle the divide in Medieval Views of the Cosmos: Picturing the Universe in the Christian and Islamic Middle Ages (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2004). Patrick Gautier Dalché denies any connection, in “Géographie Arabe et Géographie Latine au XIIe Siècle,” Medieval Encounters 19, no. 4 (2013), 408–33. Jean-Charles Ducène, Stefan Schröder, Piero Falchetta, and other scholars who presented at the recent conference “Cartography between Europe and the Islamic World 1100–1600” argue the reverse. See http://www.cartography.qmul.ac.uk/ conference/index.html. 3. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid. MS. Vitr. 014/003, f. 116v. http://bdh .bne.es/bnesearch/CompleteSearch.do?field=todos&fechaFhasta=&text=isidoro &fechaFdesde=&sort=&showYearItems=&exact=on&textH=&advanced=false&com pleteText=&tipomaterial1=Manuscrito&pageSize=1&pageSizeAbrv=10&pageNumber=52. 4. Further discussion of this manuscript can be found in Pinto, Medieval Islamic Maps (2016); in addition the map and identification details of its Norman provenance will be made available in the author’s next book, “Medieval Islamic Maps: The Mediterranean in the Islamic Cartographic Imagination.” 5. This is one of the most studied KMMS manuscripts. Images of it have been published since Leo Bagrow first published his History of Cartography, rev. and enl. R. A. Skelton, trans. D. L. Paisey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964) (repr. Chicago: Precedent, 1985). Originally published as Die Geschichte Der Kartographie (Berlin: Safari-Verlag, 1951), plate A; and History of Cartography 2.1, plate 7. Yet until now no one was able to definitively identify its provenance. 6. I plan to publish details of this identification in a separate article. Further details on the Mediterranean map in this manuscript will also be discussed in my forthcoming book “The Mediterranean in the Islamic Cartographic Imagination.” 7. David Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” in History of Cartography, ed. John Brian Harley and David Woodward, 3 vols., 1:286–370 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987–2007); Tony Campbell, “Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500,” in Harley and Woodward, History of Cartography, 1:371–463. The literature on medieval European cartography is voluminous. For this reason I cite only a few key pieces: Evelyn Edson, Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed Their World (London: British Library, 1999); Edson, “Maps in Context: Isidore, Orosius, and the Medieval Image of the World,” in Cartography in Antiquity and the

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Middle Ages: Fresh Perspectives, New Methods, ed. Richard J. A. Talbert and Richard W. Unger, 219–36 (Leiden: Brill, 2008); Paul D. A. Harvey, Medieval Maps (London: British Library, 1991); and Alessandro Scafi, “Defining Mappaemundi,” in The Hereford World Map: Medieval World Maps and Their Context, ed. P. D. A. Harvey, 345–54 (London: British Library, 2006). 8. Other discussions of this map include: Gonzalo Menendez Pidal, “Mozarabes y asturianos en la cultura de la alta edad media,” Boletin de la Real Academia de la Historia 134 (1954), 169–71; Leonid S. Chekin, Northern Eurasia in Medieval Cartography (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 59–61; and Stefan Schröder, “Kartographische Entwürfe iberischer Provenienz: Zu Raum- und Ordnungsvorstellungen auf der Iberischen Halbinsel in Karten des 9. Bis 12. Jahrhunderts,” in Von Mozarabern zu Mozarabismen, ed. Matthias Maser, Klaus Herbers, Michele C. Ferrari, and Harmut Bobzin, 257–77 (Münster: Aschendorf Verlag, 2014), 268–76. 9. Simone Pinet, The Task of the Cleric: Cartography, Translation, and Economics in Thirteenth-Century Iberia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017). 10. Menendez Pidal, “Mozarabes y asturianos”; P. Sj. Koningsveld, The Latin-Arabic Glossary of the Leiden University Library (Leiden: Brill, 1977), 60b; a folly continued more recently by the work of Cyrille Aillet, Les Mozarabes: Christianisme, Islamisation et Arabisation en Péninsule Ibérique (IXe–XIIe Siècle) (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2010), 170. Why no one would recognize these annotations as the work of an Andalusi Arab geographer familiar with Latin instead of Christian-Mozarabs generally is mystifying. 11. For an extensive and detailed analysis of the reasoning behind this argument and for an in-depth discussion of the Arabic notations on the BNE’s Ms. Vitr. 014/003, see the author’s chapter, “Eureka! A Ninth Century Isidorean T-O Map Labeled in Arabic Possibly by the Famous Eleventh Century Andalusi Geographer al-Bakrī,” in Chapter and Verse of Non-Muslim Contributions to Islamic Civilization, ed. Myriam Wissa, Alisdair Watson, and Brian Catlos (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming). 12. For the best overview of al-Bakrī’s work, see Jean-Charles Ducène, “al-Bakrī, Abū, ʿAbu ʿAbdallāh.” In Encyclopaedia of Islam Three, ed. Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, Everett Rowson, accessed July 2, 2016, http://reference works.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-3/al-bakri-abu-ubayd-abdallah -COM_24503?s.num=0&s.f.s2_parent=s.f.book.encyclopaedia-of-islam-3&s.q=bakri. 13. Jean-Charles Ducène, “Al-Bakrī et les étymologies d’Isidore de Séville,” Journal Asiatique 297, no. 2 (2009), 389–91. Even Ducène hints at BNE’s Ms. Vitr. 014/003 as a possible source for al-Bakrī but shies away from confirming the connection because of a faulty assessment by Koningsveld in his 1977 doctoral dissertation. Koningsveld, Latin-Arabic Glossary, 60b. 14. Courtesy of Ducène’s careful examination in “Al-Bakrī et les Étymologies,” 381. 15. The BNE urgently needs to carbon date the different examples of ink in order to confirm the date of the different hands, both Latin and Arabic. 16. The best discussion of the development of administrative geographies is in Paul L. Heck, The Construction of Knowledge in Islamic Civilization: Qudāma ibn Jaʿ far and His “Kitāb al-kharāj wa ṣināʿat al-kitāba” (Leiden: Brill, 2002), ch. 3.

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17. The development of the Islamic geographical tradition is discussed at length in Pinto, Medieval Islamic Maps (2016), ch. 3. 18. For more information, see Pinto, Medieval Islamic Maps (2016), ch. 3 and 4. 19. In-depth details on the identification of this manuscript as Norman will be made available in a separate article. Further details about this manuscript will also be discussed in the author’s forthcoming book on “The Mediterranean in the Islamic Cartographic Imagination.” 20. The best discussion thus far on Norman ‘alāma comes from an article coauthored by Jeremy Johns, one of the reigning experts on the art of Norman Sicily. Jeremy Johns and Nadia Jamil, “Signs of the Times: Arabic Signatures as a Measure of Acculturation in Norman Sicily,” Muqarnas 21 (2004), 181–92. In private correspondence Jeremy Johns kindly confirmed my identification of this as an ‘alāma. Unfortunately, the ‘alāma is so faint that special infrared photography is required to provide a clearer rendition of it for the purpose of decoding the signature. 21. For the best available primary description of William II and his interest in Arabic and Muslim culture, see Ibn Jubayr, The Travels of Ibn Jubayr, trans. R. J. C. Broadhurst (London: Jonathan Cape, 1952), 340–41. 22. Ibn Jubayr, Travels of Ibn Jubayr, 340–41. 23. Alex Metcalfe deftly lays out this quixotic period for Sicilian Muslims in The Muslims of Medieval Italy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 209–24; also covered briefly by Karla Mallette, The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100–1250: A Literary History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 5, 35, 47–49, 51–54, 148–50; among other references. 24. This is well attested to in the literature on the history of Norman Sicily. See, for instance, Metcalfe, Muslims of Medieval Italy, 275–77; John Julius Norwich, The Kingdom in the Sun (London: Longmans Group, 1970), ch. 20–21. 25. Hubert Houben, Roger II of Sicily: A Ruler Between East and West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 174. Jesi is sometimes referred to as Iesi. Mallette, Kingdom of Sicily, 97. 26. That sadly is the extent of our information about Roger III. Because he died before Tancred, details about Roger III are scarce in the history books. Houben, Roger II, 174. So minor a figure is Roger III that many scholars, such as, Mallette, Metcalfe, and, even old-schoolers, Denis Mack Smith, do not mention his name even in passing. The most extensive discussion on Roger III is to be found in Christoph Reisinger, Tankred von Lecce: normannischer König von Sizilien 1190–1194 (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 1992), 131–60. 27. Keeping in mind Metcalfe’s important reminder that the suppression of Islam actually began under William II who, although fond of Islamic culture and Muslim palace staff, actively chipped away at Muslim status. Metcalfe, Muslims of Medieval Italy, 209–24. 28. In Muslims of Medieval Italy, 147, Metcalfe reminds us that the Norman kings from Roger II onward used honorific Arabic descriptors in their title and that even Tancred used one. Metcalfe makes no mention, however, of possible honorific Arabic titles that may have been used by Tancred’s sons, Roger III or William III. In Alex Metcalfe, Muslims and Christians in Norman Sicily: Arabic Speakers and the End of Islam (New

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York: Routledge Curzon, 2003), 99–113, Metcalfe argues that Arabic acquisition of the Sicilian Kings improved between Roger II and William II, although he cautions us that some of the information regarding the Sicilian kings’ prowess in Arabic can be attributed to “panegyric topos.” The question of the caliber of Arabic in late twelfth-century Sicily is a matter of much discussion. See, for instance, Metcalfe’s comparative discussion of Latin translations of terms in the Monreale Arabic dafātir (registers) during the time of William II in “Trusting the Text as Far as We Can Throw the Scribe: Further Notes on Reading a Bilingual Jarīdat al-Ḥudūd from the Royal Dīwān of Norman Sicily,” in From al-Andalus to Khurasan: Documents from the Medieval Muslim World, ed. P. Sijpesteijn, 81–98 (Leiden: Brill, 2006). Metcalfe notes in addition that Arabic chancery (dīwān) documents die out after 1183 with one last one occurring sixty years later under Frederick II in late 1242. For an incredibly detailed study of Arabic chancery documents from twelfth-century Norman Sicily, see Jeremy Johns, Arabic Administration in Norman Sicily (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 29. On the question on the concept of Normanitus and how little it mattered in Southern Italy and Sicily after the 1150s, see G. A. Loud, “Review of Tankred von Lecce. normannischer König von Sizilien 1190–1194, by Christoph Reisinger,” English Historical Review 111, no. 440 (February 1996), 152. 30. The basis of this assessment is a tell-tale stamp of the Ottoman sultan, Bayezid II (r. 1481–1512), who stamped everything in the Topkapi Saray library that he read. For more information on Bayezid II’s stamp and its use to assess which manuscripts were examined by the conqueror of Constantinople, Mehmet II, see Karen Pinto, “The Maps Are the Message: Mehmet II’s Patronage of an ‘Ottoman Cluster,’” Imago Mundi 63, no. 2 (2011), 159, 161. 31. One cannot help but wonder if these were Frederick’s. The lack of known extant examples of Frederick’s signature regrettably makes this impossible to verify. Regarding Frederick’s abilities in Arabic, see Mallette, Kingdom of Sicily, 50; David Abulafia, Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor (Bristol: Allen Lane the Penguin Press, 1988), 252. 32. Mallette, Kingdom of Sicily, 70–71; Abulafia, Frederick II, 253. 33. Mallette, Kingdom of Sicily, 49–64, 70–73. 34. For an excellent discussion on Lucera and Frederick II’s fondness for it, see Karla Mallette, “Insularity: A Literary History of Muslim Lucera,” in A Faithful Sea: Religious Cultures and Identities in the Mediterranean, 1250–1750, ed. Adnan A. Husain and Katherine E. Feming, 27–46 (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007), 31–32; Mallette, Kingdom of Sicily, 56–8; Metcalfe, Muslims of Medieval Italy, 283–90; and Julie Anne Taylor’s exclusive study on the colony at Lucera, Muslims in Medieval Italy: The Colony at Lucera (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003), along with her article on “Muslim-Christian Relations in Medieval Southern Italy,” Muslim World 97, no. 2 (2007), 191–94. 35. Due to space and image limitations, I will only discuss the two most relevant maps: the map of the world and the map of the Mediterranean. 36. Slate gray with dark-blue scalloped outlines resembling the wave pattern of seas because the Mediterranean sea portion of the Leiden al-Iṣṭakhrī world map was repaired at a later date at which point a flat gray pigment was inserted. For an example of this map, see Pinto, Medieval Islamic Maps (2016), plate 1.

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37. I have not been able to definitely identify the calligraphy of the world map. Judging by its ornateness and delicate script it is probably from one of the Mediterranean caliphates: Andalus or Fatimid. The latter is unlikely because most of the maps in the Book of Curiosities suggest otherwise. Ayyubid is a possibility but it also may be that it is a remanent of the Arab Kalbid rulers of Sicily from the century before. Few illustrated manuscripts survive from the eleventh century and one has to rely mostly on Quranic manuscripts and other material culture to make identifications from this period. 38. This bird form is discussed at length in my next book project, “What’s Islamic about Islamic Maps?” (forthcoming from Medieval Institute Press). 39. For a discussion on the quixotic nature of the Encircling Ocean in the medieval Islamic cartogeographic imaginary, see Pinto, Medieval Islamic Maps (2016), ch. 5–7. 40. Due to space limitations, I am unable to discuss the Maghreb map in this chapter. I refer readers instead to my article, Karen Pinto, “Passion and Conflict: Medieval Islamic Views of the West,” in Mapping Medieval Geographies: Geographical Encounters in the Latin West and Beyond, 300–1600, ed. Keith Lilley, 201–24 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), which deconstructs this map in detail. 41. For more details on al-Sūs al-Aqsā, see Mohamed Hassan Mohamed, Between Caravan and Sultan: The Bayruk of Southern Morocco: A Study in History and Identity (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 109–24. 42. I explore the medieval Islamic maps of the Mediterranean at length in my current book project on “The Mediterranean in the Islamic Cartographic Imagination,” which examines the corpus of medieval Islamic maps of the Mediterranean to understand how the classical Islamic KMMS depiction of Mediterranean came to be symbolized with such a distinctive form with a fixed matrix of places. (Sponsored by a National Endowment of the Humanities fellowship). 43. See the voluminous work on the subject by Jeremy Johns, which would require too many entries to list singly. Also Jonathan Bloom’s work on the floor of the Cappella Palatina: “The Islamic Sources of the Cappella Palatina Pavement,” in Die Cappella Palatina in Palermo: Geschichte, Kunst, Funktionen, ed. Thomas Dittelbach, 177–98, 551–59 (Künzelsau: Wuerth Stiftung, 2011. 44. Since we know of no extant examples of Frederick’s signature, early or late—all we have is a mountain of charters that he stamped not signed by hand—if these two signatures can be proved to be those of Frederick signing in a hybrid Latin/Arabic style, they would constitute a major find that is worth investigating further. 45. The author intends to pursue this topic in a book-length discussion on “IslamoChristian Cartographic Connections.” Chapter 3. Mountains of the Moon, Lakes in the Sun, and Sinus Gangeticus 1. This essay ignores Ptolemy’s reception and revisions in Islamic lands. For the former, see Gerald R. Tibbetts, “The Beginnings of a Cartographic Tradition,” in The History of Cartography, ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward, 2:90–107 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Gerald R. Tibbetts, “The Balkhi School of Geographers” in Harley and Woodward, History of Cartography, 2:108–55. For the latter, Gerald R.

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Tibbetts, “Later Cartographic Developments,” in Harley and Woodward, History of Cartography, 2:137–55; S. Maqbul Ahmad, “Cartography of aI-SharIf aI-Idrisi,” in Harley and Woodward, History of Cartography, 2:156–72; Svat Soucek, “Islamic Charting in the Mediterranean,” Harley and Woodward, History of Cartography, 2:263–92. 2. Charles P. Daly, “Annual Address: The Early History of Cartography, or What We Know of Maps and Map-Making before the Time of Mercator,” Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York 11 (1879), 35–36; Robert Karrow, “Centers of Map Publishing in Europe, 1472–1600,” in Harley and Woodward, History of Cartography, 3:611–21; Giorgio Mangani, “Abraham Ortelius and the Hermetic Meaning of the Cordiform Projection,” Imago Mundi 50 (1998), 75. 3. W. G. L. Randles, “The Alleged Nautical School Founded in the Fifteenth Century at Sagres by Prince Henry of Portugal, Called the ‘Navigator,’” Imago Mundi 45 (1993), 20–28; Richard Uhden, “The Oldest Portuguese Original Chart of the Indian Ocean, A. D. 1509,” Imago Mundi 3 (1939), 9; Luis Filipe F. R. Thomaz, “The Image of the Archipelago in Portuguese Cartography of the 16th and Early 17th Centuries,” Archipel 49 (1995), 79–124. 4. Steven G. Darian, The Ganges in Myth and History (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1978), 166. 5. Martin W. Lewis, “Dividing the Ocean Sea,” Geographical Review 89, no. 2 (April 1999), 188–214; Lucyna Kostuch, “Between Rivers and the Sea: The Hellenic Aquatic Divisions,” International Journal of Maritime History 27, no. 2 (2015), 179–81. 6. Maghan Keita, “Africans and Asians: Historiography and the Long View of Global Interaction,” Journal of World History 16, no. 1 (2005), 9–10. 7. Steven G. Darian, “The Ganges and the Rivers of Eden,” Études asiatiques: revue de la Société Suisse–Asie 31 (1977), 43. 8. Matteo Salvadore, “The Ethiopian Age of Exploration: Prester John’s Discovery of Europe, 1306–1458,” Journal of World History 21, no. 4 (2011), 607. 9. In Darian, “Ganges and Rivers of Eden,” 53. 10. Tatsuo Hoshino, “Wen Dan and Its Neighbours: The Central Mekong Valley in the 7th and 8th Centuries,” in Breaking New Ground in Lao History: Essays on the 7th to 20th Centuries, ed. Mayoury Ngaosrivathana and Kennon Breazeale, 25–72 (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2002), 37–38; Michel Lorrillard, “Lao History Revisited: Paradoxes and Problems in Current Research,” South East Asia Research 14, no. 3 (November 2006), 387–401. 11. Andrew Kurt, “The Search for Prester John: A Projected Crusade and the Eroding Prestige of Ethiopian Kings, c.1200–c.1540,” Journal of Medieval History 39, no. 3 (2013), 302; John de Marignolli, Recollections of Travel in the East, 1339–1353, in Sir Henry Yule, Cathay and the Way Thither: Being a Collection of Medieval Notices of China, 4 vols., 2:311–94 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1866), 2:343, 373–74. 12. John Masefield, intr., Marco Polo’s Travels (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1908); Bracciolini’s account of Conti in R. H. Major, ed., India in the Fifteenth Century: Being a Collection of Narratives of Voyages to India in the Century Preceding the Portuguese Discovery of the Cape of Good Hope (London: Hakluyt Society, 1857), 21. 13. Keita, “Africans and Asians,” 22. C. C. Brown, “The Malay Annals,” Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 25, no. 2/3 (159) (October 1952), 157.

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14. W. W. Tarn, “Alexander and the Ganges,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 43, no. 2 (1923), 93–101. 15. Darian, Ganges in Myth, 169. 16. Paul Wheatley, “A Curious Feature on Early Maps of Malaya,” Imago Mundi 11 (1954), 67–72. 17. J. W. McCrindle, trans., Cosmas Indicopleustes, Topographia Christiana, bk. 11 (London, 1897, transcribed by Roger Pearse, Ipswich, UK, 2003), 358–73; Darian, “Ganges and Rivers of Eden,” 50; Jean-Francois Salles, “Writing World History: Which World?” Special issue: “Problematising World History,” guest ed. Rila Mukherjee, Asian Review of World Histories 3, no. 1 (January 2015), 11–35; Jean-Francois Salles, “Some Notes on Ancient Greek Descriptions of India,” in Beyond National Frames: South Asian Pasts and the World, ed. Rila Mukherjee, 11–36 (Delhi: Primus Books, 2015); Letter to Rusticus, no. 75, ca. 411 A. D, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, accessed October 22, 2015, http://www.ccel.org/fathers.html. The Phison also referenced the Indus. 18. Darian, “Ganges and Rivers of Eden,” 54; Jean Delumeau, History of Paradise: The Garden of Eden in Myth and Tradition, trans. Matthew O’Connell (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000). 19. Darian, “Ganges and Rivers of Eden,” 42–43, 46–47. 20. Alessandro Scafi, Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 21. J. Lennart Berggren and Alexander Jones, eds. and trans., Ptolemy’s Geography: An Annotated Translation of the Theoretical Chapters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 52. 22. Rila Mukherjee, “Oceans Connect/Fragment: A Global View of the Eastern Indian Ocean,” in Oceans Connect: Reflections on Water Worlds across Time and Space, ed. Rila Mukherjee, 215–38 (Delhi: Primus Books, 2013); Angelo Cattaneo, “European Medieval and Renaissance Cosmography: A Story of Multiple Voices,” Asian Review of World Histories 4, no. 1 (January 2016), 35–81. 23. O. A. W. Dilke, “Geographical Perceptions of the North in Pomponius Mela and Ptolemy,” Arctic 37, no. 4 (December 1984), 351; Berggren and Jones, Ptolemy’s Geography, 41. 24. O. A. W. Dilke, with additional material supplied by the editors, “The Culmination of Greek Cartography in Ptolemy,” in Harley and Woodward, History of Cartography, 1:180; W. J. van der Meulen, “Suvarnadvipa and the Chryse Chersonesos, Indonesia 18 (October 1974), 1–40. 25. B. W. Langlands, “Concepts of the Nile,” Uganda Journal, Speke Centenary Number (March 1962), 1–24; Dorothy Middleton, “The Search for the Nile Sources,” Geographical Journal 138, no. 2 (June 1972), 209–21; Klaus Geus, “Claudius Ptolemy on Egypt and East Africa,” in The Ptolemies, the Sea and the Nile: Studies in Waterborne Power, ed. Kostas Buraselis, Mary Stefanou, and Dorothy J. Thomson, 218–31 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); accessed October 22, 2015, http://www.geo graphicus.com/blog/rare-and-antique-maps/the-mountains-of-the-moon-and-the -sources-of-the-nile/; G. W. B. Huntingford, Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (London: Hakluyt Society, 1980), 175; Ralph E. Ehrenberg, Mapping the World: An Illustrated

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History of Cartography (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2006); accessed October 22, 2015, http://libweb5.princeton.edu/visual_materials/maps/websites/africa/ maps-nile/nile.html; William Desborough Cooley, Claudius Ptolemy and the Nile (London: Parker and Son, 1854). 26. Antoni Picazo Muntaner, “A Global Dream: The Indian Ocean in the European Trading Horizon,” in Mukherjee, Oceans Connect, 205–14. 27. Catherine Delano-Smith, “Signs on Printed Topographical Maps, ca. 1470–ca. 1640,” in Harley and Woodward, History of Cartography, 3:540, 545–47; Catherine Delano-Smith, “Cartographic Signs on European Maps and Their Explanation before 1700,” Imago Mundi 37 (1985), 19, 24; Kuei-Sheng Chang, “Africa and the Indian Ocean in Chinese Maps of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” Imago Mundi 24 (1970), 28. 28. Marignolli, Recollections, 349–50. 29. Piero Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map. Terrarum Orbis 5 (Venice: Brepols, 2006), 85–87. 30. Armando Cortesao, trans., The Suma Oriental of Tome Pires, An Account of the East, From the Red Sea to China, written in Malacca and India in 1512–1515 and the Book of Francisco Rodrigues Pilot Major of the Armada that Discovered Banda and the Moluccas, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt, 1944, New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, repr. 1990/2005), 1:4. 31. C. Noteboom, foreword, and B. Van ‘T Hoff, intr., Gerard Mercator’s Map of the World (1569) (Rotterdam/Gravenhage: Het Maritiem Museum Prins Hendrik, 1961), 58–59; Asia, sheet 14, plates 16 and 17, Mercator’s Map of the World. 32. Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1570, plate 48: Indiae Orientalis, Gedruckt zu Nuremberg Durch Johann Koler, Anno MDLXXII (Darmstadt, WBG, 2006); R. A. Skelton, intr., Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, Antwerp 1570 (Amsterdam: Meridian, 1964); Tavola XVIII, Carta dell’Asia: Asiae Orbis partium maximae nova descriptio di Abramo Ortelio, Venice, n.d., Roberto Almagia, Planisferi Carte Navtiche e Affini dal Secolo XIV al XVII esistenti nella Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 4 vols. (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1955), vol. 2. 33. Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map, 88. 34. Antonio de Herrera, Description de las Indias del Ponente 14 (1601) 1622, accessed July 25, 2009, http:/library.ust.hk/intro/exhibit/maps-9706/map-gallery.html; Darian, Ganges in Myth. 35. Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map; Tavola XXII, Carta dell’asia di Fausto Rughesi, Roma, 1597, in Almagia, Planisferi, vol. 2. 36. Joan Blaeu, Le grand atlas ou Cosmographie blaviane, en laquelle est exactement descritte la terre, la mer et le ciel (1663), vol. 11: Asia (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1967), 164. 37. Anon. 1562, Tavola XXXIX, in Almagia, Planisferi, vol. 1. 38. Diego Ribero, Tavola XXIII, Planisphere, Seville, 1529, Girolamo da Verrazano, Tavola XXVI, Planisphere, Rome, 1529, from Almagia, Planisferi, vol. 1. 39. Blaeu, Le grand atlas, 11:163–236. 40. Uhden, “Oldest Portuguese Original Chart,” 9. 41. John Brian Harley, “Silences and Secrecy: The Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early Modern Europe,” Imago Mundi 40 (1988), 64–65.

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42. Dilke, “Culmination of Greek Cartography,” 185; Daly, “Annual Address,” 14; Johannes Keuning, “The History of Geographical Map Projections until 1600,” Imago Mundi 12 (1955), 13–14. 43. Denis Cosgrove, “Mapping New Worlds: Culture and Cartography in SixteenthCentury Venice,” Imago Mundi 44 (1992), 65–89; R. M. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 195. 44. Abraham Ortelius, “India,” Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. 45. Sven Hedin, “Early European Knowledge of Tibet,” Geografiska Annaler 1 (1919), 290–339. 46. Claudio Ptolemy, “Decima Asie Tabula” and “Undecima Asie Tabula,” in Claudio Ptolomeo, Cosmographia Codice Latino Bibliotheca Universitaria de Valencia (Siglo XV), intr. Victor Navarro Brotons, 2 vols. (Valencia: Vicent Garcia Editores, 1983). 47. Sebastian Münster, Cosmographia, Latin ed. (Basel, 1552), 1064. 48. Tavole XX, Le penisole indiane (India intra Gangem e India extra Gangem), anon., n.d, Almagia, Planisferi, vol. 4. 49. Giovanni Botero and Johannes Metellus, Regnum Chinae, ca. 1596, accessed July 25, 2009, http:/library.ust.hk/intro/exhibit/maps-9706/map-gallery.html; Jan Huygen van Linschoten and A. van Langeren, Exacta et Accurata Delineato cum Orarum Maritimarium Regionibis China, Cauchinchina, Cambodia, Japan, (1596) ca. 1600, accessed July 25, 2009, http:/library.ust.hk/intro/exhibit/maps-9706/map-gallery.html. 50. Lionel Giles, “Translations from the Chinese World Map of Father Ricci,” Geographical Journal 52, no. 6 (December 1918), 384. 51. Blaeu, Le grand atlas, 11:164. 52. Delano-Smith, “Signs,” 540. 53. Wilcomb E. Washburn, “A Proposed Explanation of the Closed Indian Ocean on Some Ptolemaic Maps of the Twelfth–Fifteenth Centuries,” Instituto de Investigacão Cientifica Tropical, Lisboa/ Separata da Revista da Universidade de Coimbra 33 (1985), 431–41. 54. Patrick Gautier Dalché, “The Reception of Ptolemy’s Geography (End of the Fourteenth to Beginning of the Sixteenth Century),” in Harley and Woodward, History of Cartography, 3:310. 55. Pascal Arnaud, “Mapping the Edges of the Earth: Approaches and Cartographical Problems,” in The Periphery of the Classical World in Ancient Geography and Cartography, ed. Alexander V. Podossinov, 31–57 (Leuven: Peeters, 2014), 31; Jeppe Strandsbjerg, “The Cartographic Assemblage of the Globe,” Working paper 45, International Center for Business and Politics, Copenhagen, 2008, 4. 56. Veronica Della Dora and Alessandro Scafi, Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth, H-HistGeog (March 2007), accessed November 9, 2015, https://networks.h-net .org/node/5280/reviews/6435/della-dora-scafi-mapping-paradise-history-heaven-earth. 57. Paul Wheatley, “Presidential Address: India Beyond the Ganges—Desultory Reflections on the Origins of Civilization in Southeast Asia,” Journal of Asian Studies 42, no. 1 (November 1982), 26; Meulen, “Suvarnadvipa,” 5; W. J. van der Meulen, “Ptolemy’s Geography of Mainland Southeast Asia and Borneo,” Indonesia 19 (April 1975), 31. 58. Strandsbjerg, “Cartographic Assemblage of the Globe,” 4.

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59. D. Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 120, 168–69. 60. Bettina Schöller, “Transfer of Knowledge: Mappae Mundi between Texts and Images,” Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art and Architecture 4, no. 1 (Spring 2013), 42. 61. Berggren and Jones, Ptolemy’s Geography, 41. 62. Leif Isaksen, “Lines, Damned Lines and Statistics: Unearthing Structure in Ptolemy’s Geographia,” e-Perimetron 6, no. 4 (2011), 256. 63. Harley, “Silences,” 70; Richard Helgerson, “The Land Speaks: Cartography, Chorography, and Subversion in Renaissance England,” Representations 16 (Autumn 1986), 54, 81; Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, 120, 168–69. 64. Genevieve Carlton, Worldly Consumers: The Demand for Maps in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 8. 65. Jose Rabasa, Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 192; Bill Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation (London: Routledge, 2013), 133. Chapter 4. The Global and the Maritime 1. “Par les livres que nos avons / Les fez des anciens savons / Et del siegle qui fu jadis.” (ll. 25–27) [By the books that we have / we know the deeds of the ancients / and of the world that once was. OF: secle or siegle from L. sæcula “generation” or “world”], Chrétien de Troyes, Cligés, ed. Pierre Kunstmann (Ottawa: ATILF, 2009), composed 1176, ms. date 1235, accessed July 13, 2016, http://txm.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/bfm/ pdf/CligesKu.pdf. Stephen Greenblatt in The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: Norton, 2011) avoids the question of Greek or Islamic influences. For the translatio argument about Islam, see George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 1–72. 2. Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 4: Physics and Physical Technology: Part 3, Civil Engineering and Nautics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 554. 3. Francesco d’Errico, Christopher Henshilwood et al., “Nassarius kraussianus Shell Beads from Blombos Cave: Evidence for Symbolic Behaviour in the Middle Stone Age,” Journal of Human Evolution 48, no. 1 (January 2005), 3–24. Karatani Kojin, The Structure of World History, trans. Michael Bourdaghs (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 43–45; Alain Testart, Les chasseurs-cueilleurs, ou L’origine des inégalités (Paris: Société d’ethnographie, 1982), 84–85, 179–80; Koyama Shuzo and David Thomas, eds., Affluent Foragers: Pacific Coasts East and West (Osaka: Senri Ethnological Studies, 1979). 4. Ferdinand Braudel, Civilisation Matérielle et Captialisme (Paris: A. Colin, 1967), 1:305. “Modern” here is from Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (London: John Bill, 1620), aphorism 129, “printing, gunpowder and the compass. For these three have changed the appearance and state of the world.” 5. Francesco d’Errico et al., “Additional Evidence on the Use of Personal Ornaments in the Middle Paleolithic of North Africa,” PNAS 106, no. 38 (September 22, 2009), 16051–56.

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6. The three “skills” in the last sentence are apparently technical nautical terms, “āharan’ / âpasaran’ / ādi,” for which the translation is uncertain. See Āryaśūra, “Birth-Story of Supáraga,” Garland of the Buddha’s Past Lives, trans. Justin Meiland (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 1:344–45, 485. See also Needham, Science and Civilisation, 4:555. 7. Philip Hoare, The Sea Inside (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2014); on “socially distributed” rather than “inside,” see Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), esp. 49–129; and Bernhard Siegert, “Medusas of the Western Pacific: The Cultural Techniques of Seafaring,” in Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, 68–81 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015); and on the skill sets involved see John Edward Huth, The Lost Art of Finding Our Way (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 8. See Peter Sloterdijk, Globes: Spheres II, trans. Wieland Hoban (Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2014). Sloterdijk sees the “ontology of the orb” exclusively as an issue of “occidental metaphysics,” 115. 9. See Karen Pinto, Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), ch. 5 and 6. 10. Needham, Science and Civilisation 4, no. 1, 44–53; 4, no. 3, 560–67. “Haizhong” is used often in the Shan hai jing [Mountains and seas classic, fourth century BCE]. On this comparison between the Tang and Abbasids more generally, see Hyunhee Park, Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds: Cross-Cultural Exchange in Pre-Modern Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 7, 25–90. 11. For the economic structures related to this, see Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A. D. 1250–1350 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 33–35. 12. George Hourani, Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Medieval Times, ed. John Carswell (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, [1951] 1979, 109. See also Gerald R. Tibbetts, “A Comparison of Medieval Arab Methods of Navigation with Those of the Pacific Islands,” Revista da Universidade de Coimbra 27 (1979), 189–202; Tibbetts, “Comparisons between Arab and Chinese Navigational Techniques,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 36, no. 1 (1973), 97–108; and Tibbetts, “The Role of Charts in Islamic Navigation in the Indian Ocean,” in The History of Cartography, vol. 2, part 1: Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies, ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward, 2:256–62 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 258–59. 13. “舟師識地理, 夜則觀星, 晝則觀日, 陰晦觀指南針.” The original text does not survive and is reproduced in the Wenyuange siku quanshu [1782] 1038, 273–312, a text itself based on excerpts from a now lost volume of the Yongle Dadian (1403–7). 14. Abdul Sheriff, “Navigational Methods in the Indian Ocean,” in Ships and the Development of Maritime Technology in the Indian Ocean, ed. David Parkin and Ruth Barnes, 209–26 (London: Routledge Curzon, 2002). 15. “selonc qe se treuve en la mapemondi des mariner de cel mer.” Marco Polo, Il milione, ed. Luigi Foscolo Benedetto (Florence: Olschki, 1928), 176, MS fol. 77d, from BnF Français 1116 (1310 CE). The earliest known portolano chart, the Carte Pisane (ca.

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1275–1300, dates disputed, BnF Cartes et Plans, Rés. Ge B 1118) focused on the Mediterranean, and the same is true with Arabic portolans starting with the Maghreb Chart (ca. fourteenth century, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, MS. S.P. II 259). 16. On ʻAbd al-Razzāq, born in Herat in 1413, see Muzzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 54–82. 17. Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 5, uses the phrase “interregional arena”; see also Robert Batchelor, London: The Selden Map and the Making of a Global City, 1549–1689 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 11–12, 251n27, 252n28. “Gunpowder Empires,” a concept much critiqued, was classically formulated by Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Vol. 3, The Gunpowder Empires and Modern Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). 18. Gerald R. Tibbetts, “Arabia in the Fifteenth Century Navigational Texts,” Arabian Studies 1 (1974), 98. The accounts of Vasco da Gama (as conveyed by João de Barros’s Asia, 1552), Ludovic Varthema (ca. 1508), and Afonso de Albuquerque (1511) all contain descriptions of reading Arab and Malay charts with navigational and route lines. On Ibn Mājid, see G. R. Tibbetts, Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean before the Coming of the Portuguese: Being a translation of Kitab al-Faw’id fi usul al-bahr wa’l-qawa’id of Ahmad ben Majid al-Najdi together with an introduction on the history of Arab navigation, notes on the navigational techniques and on the topography of the Indian Ocean and a glossary of navigational terms (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1971); see also the 1926 copy of a Damascus Kitāb al-fawāʼid dated 1576, LOC Arabic manuscript, SM-53, VK551.A46 1926. 19. Al-Mahrī’s works are collected in Yale Beinecke Library Landberg MSS 401, ca. 1568; and Gabriel Ferrand, Instructions nautiques et routiers arabes et portugais des XVe et XVIe siècles, 4 vols. (Paris: Libraire Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1921–28), based on BnF Arabe 2559 and 2292. 20. Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World: Studies on Culture and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 37–38; Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 17–26. 21. Casale, Ottoman Age, 64. 22. Al-barq al-Yamānī fī l-fatḥ al-ʿUthmānī (ca. 1565), quoted in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 124–25. 23. See Ismail Göksoy, “Ottoman-Aceh relations as documented in Turkish sources,” in Mapping the Acehnese Past, ed. R. Michael Feener, Patrick Daly, and Anthony Reid, 65–96 (Leiden: KITLV, 2011). 24. The Deniz Atlas is Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, W.660, and the Indian Ocean map is f. 2v-3r. Thomas Goodrich, “Atlas-I Hümayun: A Sixteenth Century Ottoman Maritime Atlas Discovered in 1984,” Archivum Ottomanicum 10 (1985), 84–101; Goodrich, “The Earliest Ottoman Maritime Atlas: The Walters Deniz Atlas,” Archivum Ottomanicum 11 (1986), 25–44; Dimitris Loupis, “Ottoman Nautical Charting and Miniature Painting: Technology and Aesthetics,” in M. Uğur Derman 65th Birthday Festschrift / 65 Yaş Armağanı, ed. İrvin Cemil Schick (Istanbul: Sabancı Üniversitesi, 2000), 369–97, esp. 391; Casale, Ottoman Age, 192.

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25. On Safavid astrolabe maps, see David King, World Maps for Finding the Direction and Distance of Mecca (Leiden: Brill, 1999); and King, “Two Iranian World Maps,” Imago Mundi 49 (1997), 62–82. 26. David King, “The Sacred Geography of Islam,” in Mathematics and the Divine: A Historical Study, ed. Teun Koetsler and Luc Bergmans, 161–78 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005), 166, 171. 27. Zakariyāʾ al-Qazwīnī (b. Qazvin, Persia, 1203; d. 1283 Baghdad) and Muḥammad ibn Maḥmūd ibn Aḥmad-i Ṭūsī (fl. 1167–94, Seljuq Baghdad), ʿAjāʿib al-makhlūqāt va-gharāyib al-mawjūdāt [Wonders of creation and marvelous possessions], sixteenth century, Persian scribe, Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, W.593. See http://www.thedig italwalters.org/Data/WaltersManuscripts/html/W593/description.html; Karin Rührdanz, “An Ottoman Illustrated Version of Muhammad al-Tusi’s ʿAjāʿib al-makhlūqāt,” Arab Historical Review for Ottoman Studies 19/20 (1999), 455–75; and generally, Persis Berlekamp, Wonder, Image and Cosmos in Medieval Islam (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011). Earlier maps in al-Qazwīnī manuscripts are very different, notably the oldest surviving in al-Qazwīnī’s Āthār al-Bilād (1329) British Library, MS. Or. 3623, which also includes a climate diagram on f. 5. Those maps look back to the 1029 CE sketch map by Al-Bīrūnī, preserved in a 1238 copy of Kitāb al-Tafhīm li-awāʼil ṣināʻat al-tanjīm, British Library, MS. Or. 8349, f. 58; and are similar to the 1539 version of al-Qazwīnī’s ʿAjāʿib al-makhlūqāt MS Pococke 350, f. 73v. 28. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Iranians Abroad: Intra-Asian Elite Migration and Early Modern State Formation,” Journal of Asian Studies 51, no. 2 (1992), 340–63. 29. On the Selden Map (Bodleian Library, MS Selden Supra 105), see Batchelor, London; Robert Batchelor, “The Selden Map Rediscovered: A Chinese Map of East Asian Shipping Routes, c. 1619,” Imago Mundi 65, no. 1 (January 2013), 37–63; Batchelor, “The Selden Map and the Archipelagos of East and Southeast Asia,” Education about Asia (Fall 2014), 33–38; Batchelor, “從《東西洋航海圖》觀察東亞群島 / Viewing the East Asian Archipelago through the Selden Map,” in Mapping Ming China’s Maritime World, ed. Tianlong Jiao, 1:22–63 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Maritime Museum, 2015); and Timothy Brook, Mr. Selden’s Map of China (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). 30. Ibn Battuta, Travels in Asia and Africa 1325–1354, trans. H. A. R. Gibb (London: Broadway House, 1929), 113–15. 31. Kirti Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 102–3. 32. Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Chapter 5. Charting China in the Thirteenth-Century World Acknowledgment: The William Dearborn Fellowship of American History provided a financial subsidy for my archival research involving W. W. Rockhill Papers (MS Am 2121) and W. W. Rockhill Additional Papers (MS Am 2122) at the Houghton Library, Harvard University, during the 2016–17 academic year. 1. This chapter adopts the Hanyu Pinyin system for romanizing Chinese characters

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throughout, with the exception of spellings used in the titles of book and documents, as well as spellings of personal and geographical names mentioned in Rockhill and Hirth’s books, letters, and other documents, where I include the original spellings in parentheses on their first appearances. Hirth and Rockhill adopted the Wade-Giles system to romanize Chinese characters. 2. Official records show that the book was printed in September 1911 by the Printing Office of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. Nonetheless, based on a letter sent from Hirth to Rockhill, the actual date of publication should fall in the spring of 1912. Hirth to Rockhill, New York, January 3, 1912; January 13, 1912; May 20, 1912; Munich, July 15, 1912. W. W. Rockhill Papers. 3. Hirth to Rockhill, New York, January 25, 1904; March 20, 1905; November 10, 1905. Rockhill Additional Papers. 4. In this chapter, the primary reference concerning the chronology of Rockhill’s career and life is Paul A. Varg, Open Door Diplomat: The Life of W. W. Rockhill (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1952). 5. Hirth to Rockhill, New York, March 7, 1905, Rockhill Papers. 6. Hirth to Rockhill, New York, May 5, 1909, Rockhill Additional Papers. 7. Takeshi Hamashita, China, East Asia and the Global Economy: Regional and Historical Perspectives, ed. Linda Grove and Mark Selden (New York: Routledge, 2008). 8. Yang Bowen, “Qian yen,” in Zhu fan zhi jiao shi, Zhi fang wai ji jiao shi [Verification and annotation of Zhu fan zhi and Zhi fang wai ji], ed. Yang Bowen and Xie Fang, 3–5 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2000), 3–5. In this chapter, the text of Zhao’s Zhu fan zhi is based on Yang’s verification and annotation in the following book: Yang Bowen, “Zhu fan zhi jiao shi,” ed. Yang Bowen and Xie Fang, Zhu fan zhi jiao shi, 1–224. In this book, each section is paginated starting from page 1. Yang’s “Zhi fan zhi jiao shi” is cited hereafter as Yang, ZFZ. 9. Yang, ZFZ, 1. 10. Table 5.1 displays the Chinese characters of all places mentioned in Zhao’s survey and their possible contemporary locations, as Hirth and Rockhill identified them. 11. Yang, ZFZ, 1. 12. Yang, ZFZ, 9. 13. Yang, ZFZ, 55. 14. Yang, ZFZ, 90. 15. Yang, ZFZ, 89. 16. Yang, ZFZ, 34. 17. Yang, ZFZ, 35. 18. Yang, ZFZ, 117. Duopandi state, according to Rockhill and Hirth, was Dimiath in Egypt. 19. Yang, ZFZ, 68. 20. Yang, ZFZ, 16. 21. Yang, ZFZ, 35. 22. Yang, ZFZ, 72. 23. Yang, ZFZ, 100. 24. Yang, ZFZ, 91.

NOTES TO PAGES 97–102

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25. Yang, ZFZ, 91. 26. Hirth to Rockhill, New York, March 30, 1910. Rockhill Additional Papers. 27. Hirth to Rockhill, New York, November 22, 1910. Rockhill Additional Papers. 28. Here “Kang-hi” refers to Kangxi zi dian [Dictionary of Kang-hsi], compiled between 1710 and 1716 during the reign of the Qing Emperor Kangxi (r. 1661–1722). 29. Hirth to Rockhill, New York, November 22, 1910. 30. Earlier proposals included “CHAU JU-KUA’s ETHNOGRAPHY of the Foreign Nation of the Twelfth Century”; “CHU-FAN-CHȈ: A Description of Barbarians” (or “A Description of Foreign Countries, by Chau Ju-Kua)”; and “Chu-fan-chi: A Description of Foreign Lands by Chau Ju-kua, Being Noted on the Chinese Trade in the Southern Ocean in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries.” Hirth to Rockhill, New York, March 30, 1910; November 22, 1910; February 1911. Rockhill Additional Papers. 31. Friedrick Hirth and W. W. Rockhill, Chau Ju-Kua: His Work on the Chinese and Arab Trade in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Entitled Chu-fan-chï (St. Petersburg: Printing Office of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1911), 7. 32. Hirth and Rockhill, Chau Ju-kua, 20. 33. Hirth and Rockhill, Chau Ju-kua, 119. 34. Hirth and Rockhill, Chau Ju-kua, 4. 35. Hirth and Rockhill, Chau Ju-kua, 8. 36. Hirth and Rockhill, Chau Ju-kua, 122n13, 133–45. 37. Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A. D. 1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 197–201. 38. Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 48–49. 39. Exemplary studies of this subject include Billy K. L. So, Prosperity, Region, and Institutions in Maritime China: The South Fukien Pattern, 946–1368 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center and Harvard University Press, 2000); Angela Schottenhammer, ed., The Emporium of the World: Maritime Quanzhou, 1000–1400 (Leiden: Brill, 2001); Tansen Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-Indian Relations, 600–1400 (Honululu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003); Tansen Sen, India, China and the World: A Connected History (Lanham, MD: Roman and Littlefield, 2017); John W. Chaffee, “Diasporic Identities in the Historical Development of the Maritime Muslim Communities of Song-Yuan China,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 49, no. 4 (2006), 395–420; Hyunhee Park, Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds: Cross-Cultural Exchange in Pre-Modern Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 40. Hirth and Rockhill, Chau Ju-kua, 153. 41. Liang Qichao, “Zhongguo zhimin bada weiren zhuan,” Yin bing shi he ji (zhuan ji zhi 8), 1–5. First published in Xin min cong bao [New people’s series], no. 63, 3rd year, issue 15 (Yokohama, February 18, 1905), 81–88. 42. Huei-Ying Kuo, “Learning from the South: Japan’s Racial Construction of Southern Chinese, 1895–1941,” in Race and Racism in Modern East Asia: Interactions, Nationalism and Gender, ed. Walter Demel and Rotem Kowner, 151–77 (Leiden: Brill, 2015).

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43. Hirth to Rockhill, New York, January 18, 1904. 44. Wang Gungwu captures the relationship between Chinese overseas and imperial China by the concept, merchants without empire. Wang, “Merchants without Empire: The Hokkien Sojourning Communities,” in The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750, ed. James D. Tracy, 400–422 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 45. Hirth to Rockhill, New York, January 28, 1908. Rockhill Papers. 46. Rockhill, “Conditions in China, Viewed from Peking,” Peking, March 15, 1914, 5. Rockhill Additional Papers. 47. Tsai to Rockhill, Beijing, March 30, 1914. Rockhill Papers. The salary was $3,000 for the period from October 1 to December 31, 1941, although Rockhill did not receive this in person due to his sudden death in December. Tsai Ting Kan to Edith Howell Perkins, February 4, 1915. Rockhill Papers. 48. Tsai Ting Kan to Perkins, February 4, 1915. 49. Rockhill, “Conditions in China,” March 15, 1914, 9. 50. This is an unsigned article, but Rockhill annotates his news clipping of this piece with “written by E. H. Parker,” an apparent reference to British Sinologist Edward Harper Parker (1849–1926). “Notes and Translations from the Chu fan chih,” Rockhill Additional Papers. 51. Anonymous, “A Wise Chinaman was Marco Polo’s Predecessor: Concerning the Outside Barbarians and Their Geographer. Valuable Work of Americans in Translating Chan [Chau] Ju-Kua,” Sun (New York), March 1, 1913. In a list of reviews that Hirth organized, he identifies the unsigned author as W. Churchill, editor of the “Sun.” Hirth to Rockhill, New York, May 13, 1913. 52. “Notes and Translations from the Chu fan chih,” Rockhill Additional Papers. 53. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), ch. 3. 54. Huei-Ying Kuo, Networks beyond Empires: Chinese Business and Nationalism in the Hong Kong–Singapore Corridor, 1914–1941 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), ch. 5. 55. Leander Seah, “Conceptualizing the Chinese World: Jinan University, Nanyang Migrants, and Trans-regionalism, 1900–1941” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2011), ch. 3; accessed January 10, 2015, ProQuest Paper AAI3462170. 56. Representative books include Hu Bingxiong, Nanyang huaqiao zhimin weiren zhuan [Biographies of eminent Chinese colonial heroes in the South Seas] (Shanghai: Guoli Jinan daxue nanyang shiye wenhua shiye bu, 1928); Liu Jixuan and Shu Zhizheng, Zhonghua minzu tuozhi nanyang shi [History of colonization by the Chinese people in the South Seas] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1934); Li Changfu, Zhongguo zhimin shi [Chinese colonial history] (Shanghai: Shangwu yin shu guan, 1937). 57. This is a translation of two terms with similar meanings used in publications related to world history in both China and Japan during the early twentieth century: Dong xi jiao she shi (Jp. Tōzai kōshō-shi) and Dong xi jiao tong shi (Jp. Tōzai kōtsū-shi). The difference in nuance between them is that jiao tong (kōtsū) emphasizes transportation, or the structure of trade, while jiao she (kōshō) is more concerned with interpersonal negotiation or diplomatic contact. The representative Chinese scholar of this paradigm

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was Feng Chenjun. Beginning in 1931, the Shanghai Commercial Press (Shangwu yin shu guan) started to publish compilations of research articles that Feng had collected from journals featuring Western Oriental scholars, such as T’oung Pao, Journal Asiatique, and Bulletin de l’Ecole française d’Extrème Orient. The first book was entitled Shi di kao cong [A compilation of research on history and geography], published by the Shanghai Commercial Press [Shangwu yin shu guan] in 1931: its English title, Studies in Oriental History and Geography, better captures the specific perspective that the researchers originally applied to the examination of space and time in the Orient. In 1934, the Shanghai Commercial Press published a set of four series of studies under the title, Xi yu nan hai shi di kao zheng yi cong [Book series of translated research concerning the geography and history of the Western Territories and the South Seas]. 58. Zheng Hongnian, “Fa kan ci” [Inauguration statement], Nanyang Monthly 1, no. 1 (January 1927), 2. 59. Hu, Nanyang huaqiao zhimin weiren zhuan, 2. 60. Liu and Shu, Zhonghua minzu tuozhi nanyang shi, 6. 61. Li, Nanyang huaqiao shi. 62. The original publication of Li’s data is from Li Changfu, “Shi jie de huaqiao” [Chinese sojourners of the world], Eastern Miscellany 20, no. 16 (1923), 57–78. 63. Zhu Xie, trans., “Zhongguo zhimin zhi dili de fangshi” [Geographical types of Chinese colonization], Eastern Miscellany 27, no. 6 (1930), 43. 64. Li, Zhongguo zhimin shi, 39–59. 65. Li, Zhongguo zhimin shi, 60–64. 66. The original article is Paul Pelliot, “Friedrich Hirth and W. W. Rockhill, Chau Ju-kua: His work on the Chinese and Arab Trade in the twelfth and thirteenth Centuries, entitled Chu-fan-chi, traduit et annoté, St. Pétersbourg, Imprimerie de l’Académie des Sciences, 1912,” T’oung Pao 13 (1912), 446–81. The Chinese translation of Pelliot’s book review is Pelliot, “Zhu fan zhi yi zhu zhengwu,” in Xi yu Nan hai shi di kaozheng yicong, ed. and trans. Feng Chenjun, 101–36 (Shanghai: Shangwu yin shu guan, 1932). 67. Pelliot, “Zhu fan zhi yizhu zhengwu,” 113–14. 68. Pelliot, “Zhu fan zhi yi zhu zhengwu,” 112–14. 69. Pelliot, “Zhu fan zhi yizhu zhengwu,” 113; Hirth and Rockhill, Chau Ju-kua, 142. 70. Feng Chenjun, Zhu fan zhi jiao zhu [Verification and annotation of Zhu fan zhi] (Changsha: Shangwu yin shu guan, 1940). Feng’s preface is dated June 24, 1937. Page numbers are based on the version reprinted in 1956 in Beijing by Zhonghua shuju. A further reprint was published in Taipei in 1962 by Taiwan shangwu yin shu guan. 71. Feng, Zhu fan zhi jiao zhu, 14n4. 72. Feng, Zhu fan zhi jiao zhu, 80–81n9. 73. Feng, Zhu fan zhi jiao zhu, 148n1. 74. Hirth and Rockhill, Chau Ju-kua, 85n1. 75. Feng, Zhu fan zhi jiao zhu, 2–3. 76. Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation. 77. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

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Chapter 6. The Case of Bingata 1. Li Dingyuan, Shi Liuqiu ji [Account of a mission to Ryūkyū] (Taipei: Wenhai chubanshe, 1970), juan 3, 24–25. 2. Yanagi Soetsu, The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty, trans. and adapted Bernard Leach (New York: Kodansha International, 1989), 166. 3. Kim Brandt, Kingdom of Beauty: Mingei and the Politics of Folk Art in Imperial Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 208–9. 4. Yanagi professes his admiration of Okinawan dyers for their “instinctive good taste”: “I am always astonished at their freedom; their bird or flower patterns are so easily and freshly taken from nature. Mountains, rivers, waves or buildings become patterns lovelier than nature itself casually provides, yet still more strongly evoke nature’s beauty. Thus we may say the Okinawan birds remind us of the patterns, and the patterns of birds.” Yanagi, Unknown Craftsman, 167. 5. Brandt, Kingdom of Beauty, 52. 6. Yanagi, Unknown Craftsman, 203. 7. Reiko Mochinaga Brandon and Barbara B. Stephan, Textile Art of Okinawa (Honolulu: Honolulu Academy of Arts, 1990), 8. 8. See Hamashita Takeshi, “The Lidai Baoan and the Ryūkyū Maritime Tributary Trade Network with China and Southeast Asia, the Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries,” in Chinese Circulations: Capital, Commodities, and Networks in Southeast Asia, ed. E. Tagliacozzo and Wen-Chin Chang, 107–29 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 9. Zhang Tingyu et al., Mingshi [The history of the Ming] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974), juan 323.211. Akamine Mamoru has argued that the designation of “thirty-six” was an idiom that implied a great number of challenging tasks, rather than the exact number of families dispatched to the kingdom. See Akamine, The Ryukyu Kingdom: Cornerstone of East Asia, trans. Lina Terrell (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2017), 24. 10. Wang Qing, “Trade Relations between China and the Ryūkyūs during the Reign of Emperor Kangxi (1662–1722),” in Trading Networks In Early Modern East Asia, ed. Angela Schottenhammer, 156–94 (Weisbaden: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010), 176. 11. See Sakamaki Shunzo, “Ryūkyū and Southeast Asia,” Journal of Asian Studies 23, no. 3 (1964), 383–89. 12. See Matsuda Mitsuga, “The Ryūkyūan Government Scholarship Students to China 1392–1868,” Monumenta Nipponica 21, no. 3/4 (1966), 273–304; Xu Gongsheng, “Liuqiu guo zai hua liuxuesheng” [Overseas students from the Ryūkyū Kingdom in China], Fujian shifan daxue xuebao 4 (1987), 102–7. 13. Gregory Smits, Visions of Ryūkyū: Identity and Ideology in Early-modern Thought and Politics (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999), 39. 14. Tei Heitetsu, comp., Kyūyō [Chronicle of Ryūkyū], ed. Kuwae Katsuhide (Tokyo: Sanʾichi Shobō, 1971), juan 6, 87 (King Shō Shitsu, 16th year). 15. Textual evidence of silk production on the archipelago is scarce, and what written materials exist on the introduction of sericulture are contradictory. According to one account, Do no Ohiya from Kumejima introduced the techniques to produce silk yarn from China soon after the establishment of tributary relations. Katrien Hen-

NOTES TO PAGES 122–124

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drickx, Origins of Banana-Fibre Cloth in the Ryukyus, Japan, Studia Anthropologica (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2007), 90–91. 16. Kyūyō, juan 6, 86 (King Shō Shitsu, 12th year). 17. Kyūyō, supplementary juan 2, 460 (King Shō Tei, 31st year). Ōmitake Hyōbu is also credited for learning how to boil mollusks to create thin mother-of-pearl inlay used in lacquerware decoration. 18. Kyūyō, juan 13, 189 (King Shō Kei, 24th year). 19. Xu Baoguang, Zhongshan chuan xin lu [Memoirs of Zhangshan], 6 vols. juan 5, 11–16 (Taipei: Datong Shuju youxian gongsi, 1995, repr.) 20. Wang, “Trade Relations between China and the Ryūkyūs,” 182. 21. Zhou Huang, Liuqiu guo zhi lue [Annals of the Ryūkyū Kingdom], 3 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1985), juan 14, 2a. 22. Xu Baoguang further remarked, “In this country, only bashôfu is woven. Every household has a loom every woman can weave. The [cloths] made in Shuri have the especially fine colors and patterns.” Zhongshan chuan xin lu, juan 5, 12b. Katrien Hendrickx has argued that the specific species of the banana plant (Musa balbisiana) and bashôfu weaving were introduced into the Ryūkyū archipelago from Southern China. See Hendrickx, Origins of Banana-Fibre Cloth. 23. Zhou, Liuqiu guo zhi lue, juan 14, 2a. 24. Hendrickx, Origins of Banana-Fibre Cloth, 153. 25. According to Hendrickx, records of woven patterns on bashôfu date no earlier than 1663. Origins of Banana-Fibre Cloth, 144. 26. George H. Kerr has argued that after the Ryūkyū Kingdom lost its position as an important intermediary in East Asian and Southeast Asian trade (following the decline of the Ming, the unification of the Japanese archipelago under the Tokugawa bakufu, and Satsuma’s claim on the Ryūkyū’s former monopoly on overseas trade), the government turned to local agricultural production to strengthen its economic base. See Kerr, Ryukyu Kingdom and Province before 1945 (Washington, DC: Pacific Science Board, National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council, 1953). In contrast, Ta-Tuan Ch’en has argued that the Ryūkyū Kingdom served as an important bridge between Ming-Qing China and Satsuma, through which the latter was able to obtain highly coveted Chinese goods to sell in Japan and to secure technical knowledge. See Ta-Tuan Ch’en, “Sino-Liu-Ch’iuan Relations in the Nineteenth Century” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1963). 27. Oshiro Shizuko and Uezu Toshio, “Okinawa no orimono” [Okinawan woven textiles], in Okinawa bijutsu zenshū [The art of Okinawa], vol. 3, ed. Oshiro Sosei (Naha: Okinawa Taimususha, 1989), 3:245. 28. Iha Fūyū, Ko Ryūkyū bingata kaidai [Bibliographical introduction to bingata of Old Ryūkyū] (Tokyo: Kōgeisha, 1928). 29. Kamakura Yoshitaro, “Textiles,” in Craft Treasures of Okinawa, ed. Kawakita Michiaki et al., trans. Erika Kaneko, 261–72 (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1978), 266. 30. Yonamine Ichiko, “Bingata: Its Color and Forms,” in Splendor of the Dragon: Costumes of the Ryukyu Kingdom, ed. Gloria Gonick (Los Angeles: Craft and Folk Art Museum, 1995), 24.

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31. Gao Hanyu and Bao Mingxin, Zhongguo lidai zhi ran xiu tulu [Catalogue of textiles and embroideries throughout Chinese history] (Hong Kong: Shangwu yinshu guan, 1986), 25–28. 32. Fujian Provincial Museum, Fuzhou Nan Song Huang Sheng mu [Fuzhou Southern Song dynasty tomb of Huang Sheng] (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1982), 126. 33. Kamakura claims that he discovered the oldest bingata garment in 1926, preserved in Gushichā, Aza Kamigushiku (Kumejima), and assumed it to have been worn by a daughter or niece of the Chinaha lord during the reign of King Shō En (1470–76). “Textiles,” 266. 34. The Omoro-sōshi, the anthology of Ryūkyūan court songs, refers to a garment decorated with depictions of flowers and birds called wegaki-mihane or “painted wings,” that was worn by noro priestesses. Okamura, “Bingata no sono rekishi to giho” [Bin-gata: a historical and technical study], in Oshiro Sosei, Okinawa bijutsu zenshū, 3:94. Iha Fuyū argued that wegaki-mihane was initially used to describe costumes patterned with butterflies and dragonflies, but later come to denote all garments with similar printed designs. See Okamura for a comprehensive overview of early scholarship on bingata. 35. Kamakura, “Textiles,” 266–67. 36. Yoshioka Sachio, Ryūkyū Bingata (Kyoto: Kyoto Shoin, 1993), 95. 37. See, for example, Brandon and Stephan, Textile Art of Okinawa. 38. See Kyūyō, juan 13, 213 (King Shō Boku, 15th year). Kamakura claims that Chinen Chikudun Peechin studied not paper printing, but Chinese dyeing methods, stencil-painting, and painting with pigments in general—and his descendants became Shuri dyers. “Textiles,” 270. 39. Okamura, “Bingata no sono rekishi to giho,” 109. 40. Okamura, “Bingata no sono rekishi to giho,” 115. Kamakura cites an entry from the Mizaisei (a compilation of the revenue and expenditure of government) about dues from craftsmen and weavers dated to 1715, which states: “There are forty-five [sic] dyers, twenty of them in Shuri, twenty in Tuma’i, and thirteen in Naha who are to produce two kan per head and month. Kamakura, “Textiles,” 270. 41. See Kyūyō, juan 11, 155 (King Shō Kei, 14th year). Yamaguchi was preceded by Ishimine Denbaku (1658–1703) and Uehara Shinshira (1666–1701), who traveled to Fuzhou to study calligraphy and painting under Xie Tianyou and Sun Yi. See Hayashi Susumu, “Okinawa no gaka Yamaguchi Sōki ni tsuite” [On Yamaguchi Sōki, a painter from the Ryūkyū Island], Yamato Bunka 61 (1967), 25–48. 42. Kamakura, “Textiles,” 268–69. 43. See Huang Liyun, “Sun Yi to sono kachō-ga ni tsuite: Higashiajia kaiga-shi no kanten kara” [Sun Yi and his Bird-and-Flower Paintings from the viewpoint of East Asian painting history],Yamato Bunka 125 (2013), 1–14. 44. For a recent study on the circulation of late Ming painting manuals, see J. P. Park, Art by the Book: Painting Manuals and the Leisure Life in Late Ming China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012). Park pays particular attention to Zhou Lüjing’s Grove of Paintings. 45. See James Cahill, “Phases and Modes in the Transmission of Ming-Ch’ing Painting Styles to Edo Period Japan,” in Papers of the International Symposium on

NOTES TO PAGES 129–137

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Sino-Japanese Cultural Interchange, vol. 1, ed. Tam Yue-him, 65–97 (Hong Kong: Institute of Chinese Studies, 1985). 46. Nicole Rousmaniere, “Vessels of Influence: Chinese Ceramics Imported into Japan and the Formation of the Porcelain Industry” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1998). 47. Joseph Needham and Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin, Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 5, Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 1, Paper and Printing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 21. 48. Thomas Ebrey, “The Editions, Superstates, and States of the Ten Bamboo Studio Collection of Calligraphy and Painting,” East Asian Library Journal 14, no. 1 (2010), 38. 49. Basil Hall, Account of a Voyage of Discovery to the West Coast of Corea and the Great Loo-Choo Island in the Japan Sea (London: John Murray, 1818), ix. 50. Hall, Account of a Voyage, 218. 51. Hall, Account of a Voyage, 90. 52. Hall, Account of a Voyage, 215. 53. Hall, Account of a Voyage, 97. 54. Yoshioka, Ryūkyū Bingata, 91. 55. Hall, Account of a Voyage, 215. 56. Hall, Account of a Voyage, 215. 57. Hall, Account of a Voyage, 90. Chapter 7. Mapping the Tracks of Yu 1. François Jullien, A Treatise on Efficacy: Between Western and Chinese Thinking (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003). 2. Jullien, Treatise on Efficacy, 16. The original passage references the concept of shi explicitly. 齊人有言曰： 『雖有智慧，不如乘勢；雖有鎡基，不如待時。』 In my translation: “The people of Qi have a saying: ‘Wisdom and discernment are not enough if you don’t take advantage of efficacy. A hoe and a pickaxe are not enough if you don’t wait for the right season.’” For the text (including Legge’s translation), accessed February 2, 2018, http://ctext.org/mengzi/gong-sun-chou-I. See also James Legge, trans., The Chinese Classics, 5 vols. (Taipei: SMC, [1865] 1994), 3:183, accessed February 1, 2018, ctext.org. 3. Carla Nappi, The Monkey and the Inkpot: Natural History and Its Transformations in Early Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 4. I have adopted the wonderful term “hydrocrat” from Ling Zhang, The River, the Plain and the State: An Environmental Drama in Northern Song China, 1048–1128 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). The term “mediators” references Fiaschetti’s adoption of that term from Thomas Allsen’s work. 5. Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 6. Ruth Mostern, “Loess Is More: The Spatial and Ecological History of Erosion on China’s Northwest Frontier,” Journal of the Social and Economic History of the Orient, forthcoming. 7. Tan Qixiang 谭其骧, “Heyi Huanghe zai Dong Han yihou hui chuxian yige changqi anliu de jumian: cong lishishang lunzheng Huanghe zhongyou de tudi liyong

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shi xiaomi xiayou shuihai de juedingxing yinsu”《何以黄河在东汉以后会出现一个 长期安流的局面—从历史上论证黄河中游的土地合理利用是消弭下游水害的决定性 因素》[Why did the Yellow River enter a long period of stable flow after the Eastern Han: Using history to prove that rational land use in the middle course of the Yellow River was the decisive factor in eliminating lower course flood disasters], 《学术月 刊》Academic Monthly 11 (1962), 33–38. See also Ruth Mostern, “Sediment and State in Imperial China: The Yellow River Watershed as an Earth System and a World System,” Nature and Culture 13, no. 2 (2016), 121–47. 8. Ling Zhang, The River, the Plain and the State. 9. This part of the chapter draws substantially on Christian Lamouroux, “From the Yellow River to the Huai: New Representations of a River Network and the Hydraulic Crisis of 1128,” in Sediments of Time: Environment and Society in Chinese History, ed. Mark Elvin and Liu Ts’ui-jung, 545–84 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 10. Ruth Mostern, “From Battlefields to Counties: War, Border and State Power in Southern Song Huainan,” in Battlefronts Real and Imagined: War, Border and Identity in the Chinese Middle Period, ed. Don Wyatt, 227–52 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 11. Elizabeth Perry, Rebels and Revolutionaries in North China, 1845–1945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1980), 12. 12. Ruth Mostern, “Loess Is More.” 13. Lamouroux, “From the Yellow River to the Huai,” 549. Song History River Management monograph [宋史河渠志], juan 91, Scripta Sinica, accessed February 2, 2018, http://hanchi.ihp.sinica.edu.tw. 14. James Legge, trans., The Chinese Classics, vol. 3, The Shoo King (Taipei: SMC, [1865] 1994), bilingual version, Chinese Text Project, accessed February 1, 2018, ctext.org. 15. Zhang, The River, the Plain and the State, 118–24. 16. Huanghe shuilishi weyuanhui Huanghezhi zongbian jishe 黄河水利委员会黄 河志总编辑室 [Yellow River Conservancy Commission Yellow River Document Compilation Committee], ed.黄河大事记 [An annal of major events on the Yellow River] (Zhengzhou: Yellow River Conservancy Publishers, 2002), 89. 17. I am intentionally, perhaps tendentiously, breaking up the common binome xingsheng (an advantageous or strategic position) and creating a less felicitous translation to make a point about the term xing. 18. Lamouroux, “From the Yellow River to the Huai,” 562, citing Songshi juan 91. 19. Lamouroux, “From the Yellow River to the Huai,” 557. 20. An independent Inspectorate General of Waters was established after a 1058 levee collapse debacle. 21. This section is indebted to Mark Elvin and Su Ninghu, “Action at a Distance: The Influence of the Yellow River on Hangzhou Bay Since A. D. 1000,” in Sediments of Time: Environment and Society in Chinese History, ed. Mark Elvin and Liu Ts’ui-jung, 344–410 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), esp. 394–407. This portion of Elvin and Su’s chapter is based in turn on the work of Mitsutaka Tani, 明代河工史硏究 Mindai kakōshi kenkyū [A study of river engineering in the Ming dynasty] (Kyoto: Dohosha, 1991). 22. Elvin and Su, “Action at a Distance,” 395, citing Tuo Tuo 脫脫, Jin shi 金史27, 674–75, accessed April 26, 2018, hanchi.ihp.sinicia.edu.tw.

NOTES TO PAGES 140–144

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23. Elvin and Su, “Action at a Distance,” 396, citing Jinshi juan 27. 24. Elvin and Su, “Action at a Distance,” 397. 25. Elvin and Su, “Action at a Distance,” 397, citing Wu Qihua 吳緝華, “Huanghe zai Mingdai gaidao qianxi hejue Zhangqiu de niandai” [On the date of the breach at Zhangqiu just prior to the change of course of the Yellow River in the Ming dynasty,” in Wu Qihua, Mingdai shehui jingji shi luncong 明代社會經濟史論叢 (Taipei: Taiwan xuesheng shuju, 1970), 368. From Wu Tongju 武同舉, Huaixi nianbiao 淮系年表 [Annals of the Huai River], fl. 1872, n.d. 26. Randall Dodgen, Controlling the Dragon: Confucian Engineers and the Yellow River in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001), 4–5. 27. Elvin and Su, “Action at a Distance,” 398. 28. Elvin and Su, “Action at a Distance,” 398, citing Gu Zuyu 顧祖禹, ed., Dushi fangyu jiyao 讀史方輿紀要 [Essential geography for the reading of history] (Taipei: Xinxing shuju, 1956 [1667]), juan 126 (“Da He” xia). 29. Elvin and Su, “Action at a Distance,” 399–400, citing Gu Yanwu 顧炎武, Tianxia junguo libing shu 天下郡國利病書 [Documents on the advantages and problems of the prefectures and countries of the realm] (China: Tushu jicheng, [1659] 1901), juan 13. 30. Dodgen, Controlling the Dragon, 18. 31. Edward Vermeer, “P’an Chi-hsun’s Solutions for the Yellow River Problem of the Late Sixteenth Century,” T’oung Pao 73 (1987), 33–67. 32. Xu Jiongxin, “A Study of Long Term Environmental Effects of River Regulation on the Yellow River of China in Historical Perspective,” Geografiska Annaler; Series A, Physical Geography 75 (1993), 61–72. 33. Xu Jiongxin, “A Study of the Accumulation Rate of the Lower Yellow River in the Past 10,000 Years,” Variability in Stream Erosion and Sediment Transport (Proceedings of the Canberra Symposium), IAHS Publication 224 (1994), 421–30. 34. Xu, “Study of Long Term Environmental Effects.” 35. Xu, “Study of Long Term Environmental Effects.” 36. Elvin and Su, “Action at a Distance,” 401, citing Gu Yanwu. 37. Elvin and Su, “Action at a Distance,” 404, citing Zhang Haiying, 張海英Ming shi 明史 [The history of the Ming dynasty] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2000 [seventeenth century]), accessed February 2, 2018, hanchi.ihp.sinica.edu.tw, Water Conservancy (2), 84.2047–74. 38. Elvin and Su, “Action at a Distance,” 405, citing Ming shi, Water Conservancy (2), 84.2047–74. 39. Kenneth Pomeranz, “The Transformation of China’s Environment, 1500–2000,” in The Environment and World History, ed. Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz, 118–64 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 40. Pomeranz, “Transformation of China’s Environment,” 122. 41. Gong Li 龔莉 and the Zhonghua wenming shihua weiyuanhui中華文明史話委 員會 [History of Chinese Civilization Committee], eds., 黃河史話 History of the Yellow River (Beijing: Zhongguo Dabaike Quanshu Chubanshe, 2007), 96. 42. Gong Li and the History of Chinese Civilization Committee, History of the Yellow River, section 2.3, 140–51.

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43. Xu Jiongxin, “Study of Long Term Environmental Effects.” 44. Gong Li and the History of Chinese Civilization Committee, History of the Yellow River, 151. 45. Philip C. Huang, The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985), 55. 46. Perry, Rebels and Revolutionaries, 20. 47. Perry, Rebels and Revolutionaries, 20, 33. 48. Xu, “Study of Long Term Environmental Effects.” 49. Huang, Peasant Economy and Social Change, 59–63. 50. Perry, Rebels and Revolutionaries, 10. 51. Pomeranz, “Transformation of China’s Environment,” 130. 52. Chandra Mukherjee, Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). Chapter 8. Animal Remedies in Space and Time 1. Thomas Pennant, Arctic Zoology, vol. 1: Quadrupeds (London: Henry Hughs, 1784), 20–21. 2. Félix de Azara, The Natural History of the Quadrupeds of Paraquay and the River la Plata (Edinburgh: A. & C. Black, 1838), 103. 3. Juan Ignacio de Armas, “La zoología de Colón y de los primeros exploradores de América,“ La Naturaleza 2, no. 2 (1891–96), 254; Antonio Ruiz, Conquista espiritual hecha por los Religiosos de la Compañía de Jesús (Madrid: Imprenta del Reino, 1639), 4–5, where the anta is compared to the ass (borricos). 4. Joseph Gumilla, El Orinoco ilustrado y defendido: historia natural, civil y geographica de este Gran Rio y de sus caudalosas vertientes (Madrid: Manuel Fernández 1741). 5. C. Barrington Brown, Canoe and Camp Life in British Guiana (London: E. Stanford, 1876), 240. 6. Daniel W. Gade, Nature and Culture in the Andes (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999) and “Tapir Magic in the Andes and Its Shamanic Origins,” Journal of Latin American Lore 21, no. 2 (2003), 201–20; John Brooks, “The Nail of the Great Beast,” Western Folklore 18, no. 4 (1959), 317–21; Irina Podgorny, “The Elk, the Ass, the Tapir, Their Hooves, and the Falling Sickness: A Story of Substitution and Animal Medical Substances,” Journal of Global History 13, no. 1 (2018), 46–68. 7. Brook, “The Nail”; Rafael Folch Andreu, “Curiosidades históricas: El alce y la uña de la gran bestia,” Farmacia Nueva 253 (1958), 59–62. 8. Raquel Álvarez Peláez, La conquista de la naturaleza americana (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1993); Rômulo Romeu Nóbrega Alves and Humberto N. Alves, “The Faunal Drugstore: Animal-based Remedies Used in Traditional Medicines in Latin America,” Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 7, no. 9 (2011), 1–9; Miguel de Asúa and Roger French, A New World of Animals: Early Modern Europeans on the Creatures of Iberian America (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); José María López Piñero and José Pardo Tomás, La influencia de Francisco Hernández, 1515–1587, en la constitución de la botánica y la materia médica modernas (Valencia: Instituto de

NOTES TO PAGES 152–155

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Estudios Históricos sobre la Ciencia, 1996); Wilma George, “Sources and Background to Discoveries of New Animals in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” History of Science 18 (1980), 79–104. 9. Gade, Nature and Culture, 132–35. 10. Leo Kanner, “The Names of the Falling Sickness: An Introduction to the Study of the Folklore and Cultural History of Epilepsy,” Human Biology 2, no. 1 (1930), 110; Thomas L. Bennett, ed., The Neuropsychology of Epilepsy (New York: Springer, 1992) and Owsei Temkin, The Falling Sickness: A History of Epilepsy from the Greeks to the Beginnings of Modern Neurology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). 11. Samuel Auguste Tissot, “De l’epilepsie : Spécifiques inutiles,” in Traité de l’epilepsie, faisant le Tome troisième du traité des nerfs & de leurs maladies, 353–58 (Paris: Didot, 1770); Edward H. Sieveking, On Epilepsy and Epileptiform Seizures, Their Causes, Pathology, and Treatment (London: Churchill, 1861), 310–21. 12. David Murray, Museums, Their History and Their Use (Glasgow: MacLehose, 1904), 1:60; John Ray, Travels through the Low-Countries, Germany, Italy and France: with curious observations, natural, topographical, moral, physiological, &c.: also a catalogue of plants found spontaneously growing in those parts, and their virtues (London: Walthoe, 1738), 24. 13. Samuel Merrill, The Moose Book: Facts and Stories from Northern Forests (New York: Dutton, 1916), 352; Paul Dahms, “Ehemalige Verbreitung, Aussterben und volkskundliche Beziehungen des Elchs in Westpreussen,” Globus 74 (1898), 219; Kurt Quecke, “Die Signaturenlehre im Schrifttum des Paracelsus,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der Pharmazie und ihrer Nachbargebiete (1955), 41–52; also Philip C. Almond, Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 138. 14. Apollonius Menabenus, Trattato del grand’animale o’ gran bestia: cosi detta volgarmente & delle sue parti, e facultà, e di quelle del cervo, che servono à Medici (Rimini: Simbeni, 1584); Brooks, “The Nail”; Hans Helander, “The Italian Physician Apollonius Menabenus and His Treatise De magno animali (1581),” Studi umanistici Piceni 19 (1999), 224–332. 15. Brian Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 231. 16. Wilhelm Blasius, Das Elch (Alce palmata, Klein) (Vienna: Perles, 1871); Edward Topsell, The History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents: Describing at large their True and Lively Figure, their several Names, Conditions, Kinds, Virtues (both Natural and Medicinal ) Collected out of the writings of Conradus Gesner and other authors (London: Cotes, 1658), 25. 17. Toomas Kotkas, Royal Police Ordinances in Early Modern Sweden: The Emergence of Voluntaristic Understanding of Law (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 60. 18. Menabenus, Tratatto; Vera Nigrisoli Wärnhjelm, “Apollonio Menabeni, protomedico di Giovanni III di Svezia e il suo trattato sull’alce,” in Atti della 37 Tornata degli Studi Storici dell’Arte Medica e della Scienza, ed. Fabiola Zurlini, 94–107 (Fermo: Livi, 2008), 95. 19. Topsell, History of Four-Footed Beasts, 168. 20. Andrea Bacci, Le xii pietre pretiose le quali per ordine di Dio nella santa legge, adornavano i vestimenti del sommo sacerdote: aggiuntevi il diamante, le margarite, e

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l’oro, poste da S. Giovanni nell’ Apocalisse, in figura della celeste Gierusalemme: con un sommario dell’ altre pietre pretiose: discorso dell’ alicorno et delle sue singolarissime virtù: et della gran bestia detta alce da gli antichi (Rome: Martinelli, 1587); Murray, Museums, 58–61; David Ruderman, Kabbalah, Magic, and Science: The Cultural Universe of a Sixteenth-Century Jewish Physician (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 21. Otis Green and Irving A. Leonard, “On the Mexican Booktrade in 1600: A Chapter in Cultural History,” Hispanic Review 9, no. 1 (1941), 1–40. 22. Brook, “The Nail,” where he analyzes the transfer of the properties of the elk from and to the elephant. 23. Merrill, Moose Book, 263–68. 24. Enrique Laval Manríquez, Botica de los Jesuitas de Santiago (Santiago: Asociación Chilena de Asistencia Social, 1953), 2:199. 25. Théophile Obenga and Francesco da Pavia, “La Faune du Royaume de Kongo d’après un Document inédit du XVII Siècle,” Africa: Rivista trimestrale di studi e documentazione dell’Istituto italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente 28, no. 1 (1973), 73–89; Girolamo Merolla and Angelo Piccardo, Breve, e succinta relatione del viaggio nel regno di Congo nell’ Africa meridionale, fatto dal P. Girolamo Merolla da Sorrento, sacerdote cappuccino, missionario apostolico (Naples: Mollo, 1692), 62–63. Early in the twentieth century, Afro conjure-men from Puerto Rico used the nail of the great beast as a protection. Walter Fewkes, “Precolumbian West Indian Amulets,” American Anthropologist, New Series, 5, no. 4 (1903), 690. 26. Armas, in “Zoología de Colón,” 232, suggested that “tapir” is a word that came from the French, meaning “to cover,” a reference to the Tapir´s hide. 27. François Désiré Roulin, “El tapir Pinchaque: Memoria para servir a la historia del tapir, y descripción de una especie nueva de las regiones elevadas de la cordillera de los Andes,” in Viajes científicos a los Andes ecuatoriales (Paris: Librería Castellana, 1849), 244–46. 28. Richard Eden, The first Three English books on America (?1511)–1555 A. D. (Birmingham, 1885), 131. 29. Armas, “Zoología de Colón,” 253. 30. C. E. Bosworth, E. van Dozel, B. Lewis, and Ch. Pellat, “Lamt” and “Lamta,” in The Encyclopaedia of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1983), 5:651–52. 31. James Forsyth, A History of the Peoples of Siberia: Russia’s North Asian Colony 1581–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 113. 32. Richard Hellie, The Economy and Material Culture of Russia: 1600–1725 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 276. 33. Johann P. Kilburger, “Kurzer Unterricht von dem Russischen Handel, wie selbiger mit aus- und eingehenden Waaren 1674 durch ganz Russland getrieben worden,” Magazin für die neue Historie und Geographie 3 (1769), 261–62. 34. “Nombre genérico de los animales que tienen armadura, como el venado, gamo, etc., y de cuya piel se hacen calzones, petos, etc.,” in Ciro Bayo, Vocabulario Criollo-Español Sud-Americano (Madrid: Hernando, 1910); William Entwistle, Las lenguas de España: castellano, catalán, vasco y gallego-portugués (Madrid: Itsmo, 1982), 288; see also Merrill, Moose Book, 284–86. Blasius, Das Elch, 275; Roulin, “Memoria.” 35. Topsell, History of Four-Footed Beasts, 169.

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36. Azara, Natural History, 102. 37. Merrill, Moose Book; Dahms, “Ehemalige Verbreitung.” 38. In early modern Russia, Hellie (Economy and Material Culture, 282–83) remarks that the antler and horn sector was “an exotic one”; the commodities were few and possessed by few, probably harvested in Belorussia or in western Muscovy. On the other hand, trade in expensive specimens, such as narwhale and rhinoceros horns significantly affected the volume of Russian commerce in animal by-products. 39. Merrill, Moose Book, 348; Dahms, “Ehemalige Verbreitung.” 40. Pierre Pomet, Histoire générale des drogues, traitant des plantes, des animaux, & des minéraux (Paris: Lotson, 1694), 23–24. 41. Johann Becher, Parnassi Illustrati Pars Prima, Zoologia Das ist: Deß erläuterten Medicinalischen Parnassi Erster Theil/ Nemlich das Thier-Buch (Ulm: Joh. Görlin, 1663). See Pamela Smith, The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994) and Christoffer Duffin, “Fossils as Drugs: Pharmaceutical Palaeontology,” Ferrantia 54 (2008), 53–65. 42. Matthew Ramsey, “The Popularization of Medicine, 1650–1900,” in The Popularization of Medicine, ed. Roy Porter, 97–133 (London: Routledge, 1992), 102–3. 43. Obras medico-chirurgicas de Madama Fouquet: economia de la salud del cuerpo humano, ahorro de medicos, cirujanos y botica, prontuario de secretos caseros, fáciles y seguros en la practica, sin cifras médicas, para que todos puedan usar de ellos en bien de los pobres y enfermos: sacados y comprados de los médicos y cirujanos mas famosos de toda la Europa, con la solicitud y caudales de la dicha insigne Matrona (Abuela del Mariscal de Francia Mr. el Duque de Belle-Isle, bien célebre en nuestros tiempos) para curar por sí misma en los Pobres todo género de males, aun los que hasta ahora han sido tenidos por incurables. Traducidos conforme a la Impresión correcta que hizo León de Francia en 1739 del Francés à la lengua castellana por Francisco Monroy y Olaso. Aumentadas de un Alfabeto breve de los varios remedios, Yerbas, Frutas, Raíces, Aceites, resinas y otras cosas medicinales nuevamente descubiertas en la América o Indias Occidentales en la Provincia o Misiones del gran Río Orinoco (Salamanca: Villargordo y Alcaraz, 1750), 17. 44. Diccionario de la lengua castellana compuesto por la Real Academia española (Madrid: Ibarra, 1783). 45. Erwin Patzelt, Fauna del Ecuador (Quito: Las Casas, 1979), 89. 46. Giancarlo Baronti, Tra bambini e acque sporche: Immersioni nella collezione di amuleti di Giuseppe Bellucci (Perugia: Morlacchi, 2008); Porter, Popularization of Medicine. 47. Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 48. 48. William Eamon, “Markets, Piazzas, and Villages,” in The Cambridge History of Science, ed. Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 3:217, and Harold Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 91. 49. E. H. Smith, “Concerning the Elk,” Medical Repository 2 (1799), 163. 50. J-J. Virey, “Observations sur l’ongle d’élan, jadis usité en médecine comme antiépileptique,” Journal de Pharmacie et sciences accesoires (1833), 245.

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Chapter 9. Translating Heaven Acknowledgments: The author wishes to thank the editors of this volume, along with Paul Buell, Or Amir, and Yang Qiao for their valuable comments, and the members of the IKGF Fate, Freedom and Prognostication group at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, where the author was able to present and discuss the research leading to this article. Part of this article was written during a research stay at the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. It has also received generous funding from the European Research Council, under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP/2007–13)/ERC Grant Agreement no. 312397. 1. Song Lian 宋濂 et al., Yuanshi 元史 (repr. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju 中華書局, 1976), juan 209, 4635. 2. On tributes as part of the diplomatic practices of the Inner Asian nomads, see Anatoly Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World, 2nd ed., trans. Julia Crookden (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 224–25. See also Thomas T. Allsen, Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), esp. 142–54. 3. In fostering the movement of skilled people, diplomatic exchanges were complementary to military campaigns, which also led to the forced movement of artisans and specialized personnel, but on a much bigger scale. This has recently been analyzed in Thomas T. Allsen, “Population Movements in Mongol Eurasia,” in Nomads as Agents of Cultural Change, ed. R. Amitai and M. Biran, 119–51 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2015). 4. As discussed in Allsen, Culture and Conquest. 5. In the present study, translation is understood not merely as the conversion of a text from one language into another, but also as the transmission and adaptation of the knowledge and cultural context of the text. I follow the idea of “cultural translation” as presented in Tony K. Stewart, “In Search of Equivalence: Conceiving Muslim-Hindu Encounter through Translation Theory,” History of Religions 40 (2001), 281–82. 6. A few recent studies have addressed the role and careers of religious and specialized personnel under the Mongols, with special reference to the Yuan dynasty. Two important works, among others, are C. P. Atwood, “Buddhists as Natives: Changing Positions in the Religious Ecology of the Mongol Yuan Dynasty,” in The Middle Kingdom and the Dharma Wheel: Aspects of the Relationship between the Buddhist Saṃgha and the State in Chinese History, ed. T. Jülch, 278–321. Sinica Leidensia 133 (Leiden: Brill, 2016); Shinno Reiko 秦 玲子, The Politics of Chinese Medicine under Mongol Rule (London: Routledge, 2016); Yang Qiao, “From the West to the East, from the Sky to the Earth: A Biography of Jamāl al-Dīn,” Asiatische Studien–Études Asiatiques 71, no. 4 (2018), 1231–45. 7. A seminal study on several aspects of scientific and technological transfer in Mongol Eurasia is the above-mentioned analysis by Allsen, Culture and Conquest. Other examples include: Hyunhee Park, Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds: Cross-Cultural Exchange in Pre-Modern Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), on geography; Benno van Dalen, “Islamic and Chinese Astronomy under the Mongols: A Little-Known Case of Transmission,” in From China to Paris: 2000 Years Transmission of Mathematical Ideas, ed. Yvonne Dold-Samplonius, J. W. Dauben, F. Menso, and D.

NOTES TO PAGES 165–166

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van Benno, 327–56 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2002), on astronomy, and Nathan Sivin, Kiyoshi Yabūchi, and Shigeru Nakayama, Granting the Seasons: The Chinese Astronomical Reform of 1280, with a Study of Its Many Dimensions and a Translation of Its Records: Shou Shih Li Cong Kao (New York: Springer, 2009). On craftsmanship, see, for example, Thomas T. Allsen, Commodity and Exchange in the Mongol Empire: A Cultural History of Islamic Textiles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 8. For example, see a journal issue that contains a comparative analysis of divination in different regions of Eurasia. See especially, Johan Elverskog, “The Mongols, Astrology and Eurasian History,” Medieval History Journal 19 (2016), 1–6. 9. On this, see Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 3: Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and the Earth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 3. For a very accurate study of the combination of various sciences (especially mathematics) and divination practices through the example of Buddhist–Mongolian literature, see Brian Gregory Baumann, Divine Knowledge: Buddhist Mathematics according to the Anonymous Manual of Mongolian Astrology and Divination (Leiden: Brill, 2008). 10. Allsen, Culture and Conquest, 203–9. 11. On the concept of Mandate of Heaven and common ideas of legitimation among the Mongols and the Chinese, see Herbert Franke, From Tribal Chieftain to Universal Emperor and God: The Legitimation of the Yuan Dynasty (Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1978); Peter Jackson, “The Mongols and the Faith of the Conquered,” in Mongols, Turks and Others: Eurasian Nomads and the Sedentary World, ed. R. Amitai and M. Biran, 245–90 (Leiden: Brill, 2005). See also Anatoly Khazanov, “Muhammad and Jenghiz Khan Compared: The Religious Factor in World Empire Building,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 35, no. 3 (1993), 461–79; and for the case of pre-Buddhist Mongols, see Brian Gregory Baumann, “By the Power of Eternal Heaven: The Meaning of Tenggeri to the Government of the Pre-Buddhist Mongols,” Extrême-Orient Extrême-Occident 35 (2013), 233–84. See also Thomas T. Allsen, “A Note on Mongol Imperial Ideology,” in The Early Mongols: Language, Culture and History: Studies in Honor of Igor De Rachewiltz on the Occasion of His 80th Birthday, ed. V. Rybatzki, A. Pozzi, P. W. Geier, and J. R. Krueger, 1–8 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). 12. J. P. Roux, La religion de Turcs et des Mongols (Paris: Payot, 1984); and Volker Rybatzki, “The Old Turkic ïrq bitig and Divination in Central Asia,” in Trans-Turkik studies: Festschrift in Honour of Marcel Erdal, ed. Matthias Kappler, Mark Kirchner, and Peter Zieme, 79–102 (Istanbul: Mehmet Olmez Yayinlari, 2010); Baumann, Divine Knowledge, 175. 13. In the case of the Yuan dynasty, a relevant document is the section of the Yuanshi dedicated to Mongolian rituals as part of state ceremonies. It has been translated and analyzed by P. Ratchnevsky, “Über den mongolischen Kult am Hofe der Grosskhane in China,” in Mongolian Studies, ed. Louis Ligeti, 417–43 (Amsterdam: Grüner, 1970); and more recently by Ma Xiaolin 马晓林, “Yuandai guojia jisi yanjiu” 元代国家 祭祀研究 (PhD diss., Nankai University, 2012). 14. Stewart, “In Search of Equivalence,” 274. 15. Stewart, “In Search of Equivalence,” 280. 16. Stewart, “In Search of Equivalence,” 265.

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17. This idea is expressed in the work of Mary W. Helms, Craft and the Kingly Ideal (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 14–18, and in Allsen, Culture and Conquest, 200–201. 18. This is analyzed in Baumann, Divine Knowledge and in Paul D. Buell, “Tibetans, Mongols and Cultural Fusion,” in Islam and Tibet: Interactions along the Musk Route, ed. A. Akasoy, C. Burnett, and R. Yoeli-Tlalim, 189–208 (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2011). 19. Charles R. Bawden, “Astrologie und Divination bei den Mongolen—die schriftlichen Quellen,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 108 (1958), 321. 20. Rybatzki, “Old Turkic ïrq bitig,” 80. 21. For a discussion of Old Uighur texts involving this kind of divination, see Rybatzki “Old Turkic ïrq bitig,” 83. On the reading of signs, see Bawden, “Astrologie und Divination,” 321; Rybatzki, “Old Turkic ïrq bitig,” 80; and Baumann Divine Knowledge, 175–204. 22. Rybatzki, “Old Turkic ïrq bitig,” 80. 23. For example, divination by coins is referred to as Kitad-un tabun yo’os-un tölge (the Chinese divination by five coins), clearly showing its origin. Rybatzki, “Old Turkic ïrq bitig,” 83. 24. Translation adapted from Yuan chao bi shi, The Secret History of the Mongols: A Mongolian Epic Chronicle of the Thirteenth Century, trans. Igor de Rachewiltz, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 1:203. 25. Yuan chao bi shi, Secret History of the Mongols, 2:904. Rybatzki (“Old Turkic ïrq bitig,” 84) points out that shamans were also in charge of performing divination in terms of signs, so this distinction is not always clear. 26. A. Róna-Tas, “Dream, Magic Power and Divination in the Altaic World,” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 25 (1972), 227–36. 27. In Tibet individuals such as Sa-sKya Pandita did both. Buell, “Tibetans, Mongols.” 28. Ratchnevsky, “Über den mongolischen Kult”; Elizabeth Endicott-West, “Notes on Shamans. Fortunetellers and Ying-yang Practitioners and Civil Administration in Yuan China,” in The Mongol Empire and Its Legacy, ed. R. Amitai-Preiss and D. O. Morgan, 224–40 (Leiden: Brill, 2000). 29. Allsen, Culture and Conquest, 203–4. 30. Yūsuf  Khāṣṣ Hājib,  Wisdom of Royal Glory (Kutadgu Bilig): A Turko-Islamic Mirror for Princes, trans. with introduction and notes, Robert Dankoff (Chicago: University of Chicago. Press, 1983). 31. Yūsuf, Wisdom of Royal Glory, 181. 32. Baumann, Divine Knowledge, 206, on the basis of Nathan Sivin, Traditional Medicine in Contemporary China: A Partial Translation of Revised Outline of Chinese Medicine (1972): With an Introductory Study on Change in Present Day and Early Medicine (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1987), 99n8. 33. This is what Allsen defines as “filtering,” Culture and Conquest, 203. 34. Paul D. Buell, “Some Aspects of the Origin and Development of the Religious Institutions of the Early Yüan Period” (MA thesis, University of Washington, 1968). 35. On bakshi, see Buell, “Tibetans, Mongols”; on yin-yang, see Joseph Needham,

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Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 2: History of Scientific Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 132–39. 36. As shown by Reuven Amitai, “Hulegu and His Wise Men: Topos or Reality?” in Politics, Patronage and the Transmission of Knowledge in 13th–15th Century Tabriz, ed. Judith Pfeiffer, 15–34 (Leiden: Brill, 2014). See also Jackson, “Mongols and the Faith of the Conquered.” The generic nature of translation is attested also by the absence of distinction between diviners and astronomers, as analyzed in Allsen, Culture and Conquest, 205–6. 37. Baumann, Divine Knowledge, 177. 38. The main study on this topic is by Endicott-West, who also addresses the genericity of the term. Endicott-West, “Notes on Shamans,” 230. 39. Endicott-West, “Notes on Shamans,” 230n22; A. Sarközy, “A Mongolian Manual of Divination by Means of Characteristics of the Land,” in Tractata altaica: Denis Sinor, sexagenario optime de rebus altaicis merito dedicate, ed. W. Heissig, J. R. Krueger, F. J. Oinas, and E. Schütz (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1976), 584. 40. Endicott-West, “Notes on Shamans,” 231–32. 41. These are not the only yin-yang practitioners mentioned in the Yuanshi. But it is of interest that their biographies are listed in the section about fangji 方技 “technicians and skilled experts.” For Tian Zhonglian and Jin Dejin, see Song Lian, Yuanshi 203:4538–39. 42. Song Lian, Yuanshi 203:4538. 43. Song Lian, Yuanshi 203:4535. 44. A. C. Moule and P. Pelliot, Marco Polo: The Description of the World, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1938), 2:252; Endicott-West, “Notes on Shamans,” 229. 45. On the political function of divination see Róna-Tas, “Dream,” 232–33. 46. Bawden, “Astrologie und Divination.“ 47. Peter Jackson and David Morgan, The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck: His Journey to the Court of the Great Khan Möngke, 1253–1255, trans. Peter Jackson (London: Haklyut Society, 1990), 193. Bawden, “Astrologie und Divination”; and Endicott-West, “Notes on Shamans.” 48. Rashīd al-Dīn Faḍlallāh Ṭabīb, Rashiduddin Fazlullah’s Jamiʻuʼt-Tawarikh: Compendium of Chronicles: A History of the Mongols, vol. 3, trans. and annotated Wheeler M. Thackston (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, 1998), 3:658–59. 49. For the biography of Yelü Chucai, see Igor de Rachewiltz, “Sino-Mongol Culture Contacts in the XIII Century: A Study on Yeh-Lü Ch’u-Ts’ai” (PhD diss., Australian National University, 1960). For Liu Bingzhong: Yuanshi 157, 3687–95, and Hok-lam Chan, “Liu Ping-chung (1216–1274): A Buddhist-Taoist Statesman at the Court of Khubilai Khan,” T’oung Pao, Second Series, 53, no. 1/3 (1967), 98–146. 50. Jackson, “Mongols and the Faith of the Conquered,” 250. 51. As analyzed in Chan, “Liu Ping-chung.” 52. In 1273 he even received the decree to establish the Imperial Library. Allsen, Culture and Conquest, 68. 53. Song Zizhen 宋子貞, “Zhongshu Yelü gong shendaobei” 中書令耶律公神道碑, in Li Xiusheng 李修生, Quanyuanwen 全元文 , vol. 1 (Nanjing, 1999), 170; de Rachewiltz, “Sino-Mongol Culture,” 99.

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54. 然治亂之道，係乎天而由乎人。Song Lian, Yuanshi 157:3688. 55. Reuven Amitai found evidence of a similar principle in the case of Persian sources, where the role of divination was to confirm and endorse the decisions of the ruler (especially in the case of military campaigns). Amitai, “Hulegu and His Wise Men.” 56. Song Lian, Yuanshi 203:4536. 57. Song Lian, Yuanshi 203:4536. 58. Mark Csikszentmihalyi, “Fangji,” in The Encyclopedia of Taoism, ed. Fabrizio Pregadio, 406 (London: Routledge, 2008). 59. The text reads: “Your rebel vassal is being confused by the words of sorcerers (yaoren 妖人), this is why he cannot proceed on his path. It is appropriate (yi 宜) to gather all the savants (shushi 術士) in the world, institute a Bureau for the teaching of yin-yang divination and let them teach [their] pupils.” Song Lian, Yuanshi 203:4539, trans. Endicott-West, “Notes on Shamans,” 235. On this episode, see also Ye Xinmin 叶新民, “Yuandai yinyangxue chutan” 元代阴阳学初探, Menggushi yanjiu 蒙古史研 究 6 (2000), 50. 60. Csikszentmihalyi, “Fangji.” He explains that, by most later standards in history (as in this case the Yuanshi), the meaning of this category (in reference to the liezhuan section) had already changed. 61. For a particular case of political exploitation of an accusation in sorcery, see K. Golev, “Witchcraft and Politics in the Court of the Great Khan: Interregnum Crises and Interactional Struggles among the Mongol Imperial Elite. The Case of Fāṭima Khatun,” Annual of Medieval Studies at Central European University 23 (2017), 132–44. 62. 遂遣左侍儀奉御也先乃送忠良司天臺，給筆札，令秉忠試星曆、遁甲諸書。秉 忠奏曰： 「所試皆通，司天諸生鮮有及者。」詔官之司天。Yuanshi 203, 4536. 63. Chen Gaohua 陳高, Zhang Fan 張帆, Liu Xiao 劉曉, and Dang Baohai 党寳海, eds., Yuan dian zhang: da Yuan sheng zheng guo chao dian zhang 元典章 : 大元聖政國 朝典章, 4 vols., vol. 1, juan 57: 357 (repr. Tianjin: Tianjin guji chubanshe 天津古籍出版 社; Beijing: Zhonghua shuju 中華書局, 2011). 64. This was connected—according to Endicott-West—to the high costs paid by the court and by the imperial princes to remunerate the diviners, a fact confirmed in the biography of Tian Zhongliang, where we find several references to this financial aspect. See Endicott-West, “Notes on Shamans.” 65. Song Lian, Yuanshi 90: 2297 and Allsen, Culture and Conquest, 167. See also the information about the founding of the Sitian jian 司天箭 (Bureau of Astronomy) a few years before, in D. M. Farquhar, The Government of China under Mongolian Rule: A Reference Guide, Münchener Ostasiatische Studien 53 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner), 132. 66. Morris Rossabi, Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 125, 136; Park, Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds. 67. This was the case, for example, of the divination expert Jin Dejin, who was put in charge of the mishujian by Qubilai. Yuanshi 203, 4539. 68. Chen, Yuan dian zhang. 69. Allsen, Culture and Conquest, 205. 70. Peter Jackson, The Mongols and the Islamic World: From Conquest to Conversion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 352–80.

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71. For this terminology, see Stewart, “In Search of Equivalence.” 72. Wolfgang Behr, “To Translate Is to Exchange: Linguistic Diversity and the Terms for Translation in Ancient China,” in Mapping Meanings: The Field of New Learning in Late Qing China, ed. M. Lackner and N. Vittinghoff, 173–209 (Leiden: Brill, 2004). Chapter 10. Between Local and Universal 1. For the most recent evaluation of the Black Death, see Monica Green, ed., “Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death,” Medieval Globe 1 (2014), http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/medieval_globe/1. 2. For the conventional periodization of plague pandemics, see Lester K. Little, “Plague Historians in Lab Coats,” Past & Present 213, no. 1 (2011), 267–90. For a critical reading of this system of periodization on account of its Eurocentric focus, see Nükhet Varlık, “New Science and Old Sources: Why the Ottoman Experience of Plague Matters,” Medieval Globe 1 (2014), 193–227. For the Justinianic plague, see Lester K. Little, ed., Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541–750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 3. For a still-serviceable introduction to the etiology of plague, see Kenneth L. Gage and Michael Y. Kosoy, “Natural History of Plague: Perspectives from More Than a Century of Research,” Annual Review of Entomology 50, no. 1 (2005), 505–28. 4. On the global spread of the plague out of Hong Kong, see Myron Echenberg, Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague, 1894–1901 (New York: New York University Press, 2007). 5. Katherine Royer, “The Blind Men and the Elephant: Imperial Medicine, Medieval Historians, and the Role of Rats in the Historiography of Plague,” in Medicine and Colonialism: Historical Perspectives in India and South Africa, ed. Poonam Bala, 99–110 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014). 6. See, for example, Shona Kelly Wray, Communities and Crisis: Bologna during the Black Death (Leiden: Brill, 2009). For a recent article reflecting the confusion and uncertainty of historians, see Phyllis Pobst, “Should We Teach That the Cause of the Black Death Was Bubonic Plague?” History Compass 11, no. 10 (2013): 808–20. 7. For the first comprehensive scholarly output that takes the consensus as a given, see Green, “Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World.” 8. The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language Prepared under the Superintendence of William Dwight Whitney (New York: Century, 1903), 8:86731. 9. Margaret Lock, “Cultivating the Body: Anthropology and Epistemologies of Bodily Practice and Knowledge,” Annual Review of Anthropology 22 (1993), 133–55; Lock, Encounters with Aging: Mythologies of Menopause in Japan and North America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Sean P. Brotherton and Nguyen Vinh-Kim, “Revisiting Local Biology in the Era of Global Health,” Medical Anthropology 32 (2013), 287–90. 10. Ann G. Carmichael, “Universal and Particular: The Language of Plague, 1348– 1500,” in Pestilential Complexities: Understanding Medieval Plague, ed. Vivian Nutton, 17–52 (London: Wellcome Trust for the History of Medicine at UCL, 2008).

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11. Lori Jones, “The Diseased Landscape: Medieval and Early Modern PlagueScapes,” Landscapes 17, no. 2 (2017), 108–23; Jones, “From Diseased Bodies to Disordered Bodies Politic: Rereading Medical Writing on the Plague in England and France, 14th–18th Centuries” (PhD diss., University of Ottawa, 2017). 12. Nükhet Varlık, Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 13. Varlık, Plague and Empire, ch. 7. 14. Alfred Freiherr von Kremer, “Ueber die grossen Seuchen des Orients nach arabischen Quellen,” Sitzungsberichte der Philosophisch-historischen Klasse der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften 96 (1880), 69–156. 15. D. W. Singer, “Some Plague Tractates (14th–15th Centuries),” Proceeding of the Royal Society of Medicine 9–10 (1916–17), 159–212; Karl Sudhoff, “Pestschriften aus den ersten 150 Jahren nach der Epidemie des ‘Schwarzen Todes’ 1348,” Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin 16 (1924–25), 77–188. 16. Some of the available scholarship on European plague tracts can be gleaned from the following works: C. E. A. Winslow and M. L. Duran-Reynals, “Jacme d’Agramont: The First of the Plague Tractates,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 22 (1948), 748–66; Dominick Palazzotto, “The Black Death and Medicine: A Report and Analysis of the Tractates Written between 1348 and 1350” (PhD diss., University of Kansas, 1973); Christiane Nockels Fabbri, “Continuity and Change in Late Medieval Plague Medicine: A Survey of 152 Plague Tracts from 1348 to 1599” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2006); Joël Coste, Représentations et comportements en temps d’épidémie dans la littérature imprimée de peste (1490–1725): Contribution à l’histoire culturelle de la peste en France à l’époque moderne (Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur, 2007); Jones, “From Diseased Bodies.” 17. Jacqueline Sublet, “La Peste prise aux rêts de la jurisprudence: le traité d’Ibn Ḥağar al-ʿAsqalānī sur la peste,” Studia Islamica 33 (1971), 141–49; Manfred Ullmann, Islamic Medicine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1978), 86–96; Michael W. Dols, “Plague in Early Islamic History,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 94, no. 3 (1974), 371–83; Dols, “Ibn al-Wardī’s Risalah al-Nabaʾ ʿan al-Wabaʾ: a Translation of a Major Source for the History of the Black Death in the Middle East,” in Near Eastern Numismatics, Iconography, Epigraphy and History: Studies in Honor of George C. Miles, ed. Dickron K. Kouymjian, 443–55 (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1974); Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977); Dols, “Al-Manbijī’s ‘Report of the Plague’: A Treatise on the Plague of 764–65/1363–64 in the Middle East,” in The Black Death: The Impact of the Fourteenth Century Plague, ed. Daniel Williman, 65–76 (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1982). 18. Lawrence Conrad, “Arabic Plague Chronologies and Treatises: Social and Historical Factors in the Formation of a Literary Genre,” Studia Islamica 54 (1981), 51–93. See also Conrad, “Epidemic Disease in Formal and Popular Thought in Early Islamic Society,” in Epidemics and Ideas: Ideas in the Historical Perception of Pestilence, ed. T. Ranger and P. Slack, 77–99 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Conrad, “Taʿun and wabaʾ: Conceptions of Plague and Pestilence in Early Islam,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 25 (1982), 268–307.

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19. Colin Jones, “Plague and Its Metaphors in Early Modern France,” Representations 53 (1996), 97–127. 20. See Varlık, Plague and Empire, 226–8; İhsan Fazlıoğlu, “İlk Dönem Osmanlı İlim ve Kültür Hayatında İhvanu’s-Safa ve Abdurrahman Bistami,” Divan: İlmi Araştırmalar 2 (1996), 229–40. 21. For a discussion of some of the prominent examples of the genre, see Justin K. Stearns, Infectious Ideas: Contagion in Premodern Islamic and Christian Thought in the Western Mediterranean (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). 22. For examples of scholarship that discredited Ottoman plague treatises, see Daniel Panzac, La peste dans l’empire ottoman, 1700–1850 (Leuven: Éditions Peeters, 1985), 48; Michael W. Dols, “The Second Plague Pandemic and Its Recurrences in the Middle East: 1347–1894,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 22, no. 2 (1979), 162–89, esp. 164n4. Dols noted he was not aware of any work on plague written in the Islamic world in languages other than Arabic. He mentions only one title by an Ottoman author in Dols, Black Death in the Middle East, 124–42. Manfred Ullmann included only a handful of Ottoman plague treatises in his section on the Islamic plague literature: see “Pestschriften” in Manfred Ullmann, Die Medizin im Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1970), 248–49. 23. Süheyl Ünver, “Türkiyede Veba (Taun) Tarihçesi Üzerine,” Tedavi Kliniği ve Laboratuvarı Mecmuası 5 (1935), 70–88. 24. For a brief analysis of the genre of Ottoman plague treatises of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, see Nükhet Varlık, “Disease and Empire: A History of Plague Epidemics in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (1453–1600)” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2008), 173–204; for a select list of manuscript copies, 279–83. Some of the prominent examples of the genre are examined in Birsen Bulmuş, Plague, Quarantines, and Geopolitics in the Ottoman Empire (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). See also Nurten Çankaya, “Taşköprülüzade Ahmet İsameddin Efendi’nin Risaletü’ş-şifa liedva’il-vebā adlı Risalesi Üzerine bir Değerlendirme,” in VIII. Türk Tıp Tarihi Kongresi: Kongreye Sunulan Bildiriler (Istanbul: Türk Tıp Tarihi Kurumu, 2006), 313–22. 25. For a more detailed discussion of these tracts, see Varlık, Plague and Empire, 230–47. 26. John Curry, “Scholars, Sufis, and Disease: Can Muslim Religious Works Offer Us Novel Insights on Plagues and Epidemics in the Medieval and Early Modern World?” in Plague and Contagion in the Islamic Mediterranean: New Histories of Disease in Ottoman Society, ed. Nükhet Varlık, 27–55 (Kalamazoo: Arc Humanities Press, 2017). 27. See Varlık, Plague and Empire, 52, 231; Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, “Endülüs Menşeʾli Bazı Bilim Adamlarının Osmanlı Bilimine Katkıları,” Belleten 58 (1994), 565–605; Ron Barkai, “Between East and West: A Jewish Doctor from Spain,” in Intercultural Contacts in the Medieval Mediterranean, ed. Benjamin Arbel, 49–63 (New York: Routledge: 2012 [orig. Portland, OR: Cass, 1996]). 28. Ahmed Taşköprizade, Risalah al-shifaʾ li-adwaʾ al-wabaʾ ([Cairo]: al-Matbaʿah al-Wahbiyah, 1875), 47–48. 29. For a discussion of the seasonality of plague in the Ottoman Empire, see Varlık, Plague and Empire, 18.

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30. On the extraction and trade of terra sigillata, see Pierre Belon, Les Observations de plusieurs singularitez et choses memorables, trouvées en Grece, Asie, Judée, Egypte, Arabie & autres pays estranges (Paris: Chez Hierosme de Marnef, 1588), 51–52; Heath W. Lowry, Fifteenth Century Ottoman Realities: Christian Peasant Life on the Aegean Island of Limnos (Istanbul: Eren, 2002), 153–71; Pascale Barthe, “Paroles scellées: Nature et langage en Turquie dans les observations de Pierre Belon,” L’Esprit Créateur 53, no. 4 (2013), 21–33. 31. Stephan Gerlach, Türkiye Günlüğü: 1573–1576, 2 vols. (Istanbul: Kitap Yayınevi, 2007), 189, 273, 284–85, 339–40, 365, 391, 396–98, 401, 452, 668–69, 768; Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, The Turkish Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, Imperial Ambassador at Constantinople, 1554–1562: Translated from the Latin of the Elzevir Edition of 1663 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 416. 32. Nil Akdeniz, Osmanlılarda Hekim ve Hekimlik Ahlâkı (Istanbul: N. Akdeniz, 1977), 112–13. 33. Juice extracted from the roots of this plant was used as a purgative and for eliminating intestinal parasites. For the use of scammony in medieval medicine, see Efrayim Lev and Zohar ʿAmar, Practical Materia Medica of the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean according to the Cairo Genizah (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 280–82. 34. Emir Çelebi, Enmūzecü’t-tıb, Cerrahpaşa History of Medicine Library, ms. 244/1, 2b-3a, quoted in Akdeniz, Osmanlılarda Hekim ve Hekimlik Ahlâkı, 112; Ayşegül Demirhan Erdemir, “Emir Çelebi,” Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi (Istanbul: ISAM, 1995), 11:129–30. Chapter 11. Transposing Knowledge 1. On Islamic medicine, see, for example, Peter Pormann’s study of how translated texts survived in context: The Oriental Tradition of Paul of Aegina’s Pragmateia (Leiden: Brill, 2004); Scott Montgomery, Science in Translation: Movements of Knowledge through Cultures and Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). See Montomgery’s introduction (1–14), for an outline of his larger discussion in the context of Aristotle. 2. George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the Making of the European Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). Chapters 1 and 2 (1–72) discuss the different narratives for Islamic science. For a more recent but shorter examination, see chapter 1 of Nahyan Fancy, Science and Religion in Mamluk Egypt: Ibn al-Nafīs, Pulmonary Transit and Bodily Resurrection (London: Routledge, 2013). 3. For example, Ḥunayn’s introductory works, especially his Masāʿil fi-l-ṭibb [Questions on medicine]. For a critical edition, see Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq al-ʿIbādī, Masāʾil fi al-ṭibb li-l-mutaʿallimīn, ed. Muḥammad ʿAlī Abū Rayyān (Cairo: Dār al-Jāmiʿat alMiṣrīya, 1978). 4. For a brief example of this, see Geoffrey Lloyd’s discussion on textual developments, wherein he notes that, besides later works often incoherently transposing information from earlier works, commentaries attempting to clarify the works of earlier authorities ended up replacing them, G. E. R. Lloyd, Greek Science after Aristotle (London: Norton, 1973), 172. 5. It should be noted that both the Japanese and Islamic medical traditions were

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products of a more complicated tradition than simply Sino-Korean and Greco-Roman textual traditions. The focus of this chapter limits the study to textual works within the Islamic and Japanese literary traditions and, therefore, this simplification is irrelevant for this discussion. On Indian and Persian sources in the Islamic tradition, see Kahl’s work on Abū Bakr al-Rāzī (d. 925/32), Oliver Kahl, The Sanskrit, Syriac and Persian Sources in the Comprehensive Book of Rhazes (Leiden: Brill, 2015) and, on the Buddhist/Indian and other origins of the Japanese medical literary tradition, see chapter 5 in M. A. Mujeeb Khan, “Early Japan and the Continental Medical Literary Tradition: Tanba no Yasuyori’s Conceptualization of Medicine in Ishinpō” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2016). 6. Abū Bakr al-Rāzī (d. 925/32?), al-Kitāb al-ḥāwī fī al-ṭibb [The comprehensive book on medicine]; Tanba no Yasuyori (d. 995), Ishinpō [Essential medical methods], ed. Maki Sachiko, 30 vols. (Tokyo: shobō, 1993–2012). 7. For a discussion of developments in fourteenth-century Japan, see studies on Kajiwara Shōzen 梶原性全 (d. 1337), in Andrew Goble, Confluences of Medicine in Medieval Japan: Buddhist Healing, Chinese Knowledge, Islamic Formulas, and Wounds of War (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011). 8. An important observation here is that sociocultural differences require sensitivity to how differences between traditions are understood. For an introduction to these, see Geoffrey Lloyd’s Greco-Chinese comparative work on how writers operated within these traditions, G. E. R. Lloyd, Adversaries and Authorities: Investigations into Ancient Greek and Chinese Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 9. The focus of this study is therefore not how al-Rāzī or Yasuyori actually transposed knowledge, but rather how that transposed knowledge was received and treated by subsequent scholars. Their actual transposition of knowledge and aspects of transposition within a single tradition are discussed elsewhere. On Japan, see Khan, “Early Japan”; and M. A. Mujeeb Khan, “Critique in Early Japan: Ishinpō as a Case Study on How to Read a Text,” New Ideas in East Asian Studies Special Edition (2017), 56–61; on the Islamic world, M. A. Mujeeb Khan, “The Two Ibn Sīnās: Negotiating Traditions,” Journal for the Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 6, no. 1–2 (2017), 1–26. 10. Khan, “Early Japan,” 29–31. Fujiwara no Sukeyo (d. 897). 11. The nature of Ishinpō as a manuscript (its twelfth-century recension being its earliest extant copy) problematizes this narrative with citation of Song-period sources (for a discussion, see Khan, “Early Japan,” 39–40). 12. The contrast between “Japanese” and “Sino-Japanese” or “Sino-Korean-Japanese” has not been appropriately studied in the context of the medical literary tradition. For a treatment of this see Khan, “Early Japan,” esp. ch. 1 and 5. See also Kim Yung Sik, “The Problem of China in the Study of the History of Korean Science: Korean Science, Chinese Science, and East Asian Science,” in Questioning Science in East Asian Contexts: Essays on Science, Confucianism, and the Comparative History of Science, 239–52 (Leiden: Brill, 2014). 13. Emilie Savage-Smith, “Medicine,” in Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science, ed. Roshdi Rashed, 3:903–62 (London: Routledge, 1996), 3:916–17. See also Emilie Savage-Smith, “The Working Files of Rhazes: Are the Jāmiʿ and the Hāwī Identical?” in Medieval Arabic Thought: Essays in Honour of Fritz Zimmermann, ed. R. Hansberger,

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M. Afifi al-Akiti, and C. Burnett, 163–80. Warburg Studies and Texts 4 (London: Warburg Institute, 2012). 14. For a brief discussion of this, see Sugitatsu Yoshikazu 杉立義一, Ishinpō no denrai 医心方の伝来 (Kyoto: Shibunkaku shuppan, 1991), 293–98. 15. Al-Majūsī (d. late tenth century), Ibn Sīnā (d. 1037), and Ibn ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī (d. 1231); Tanba no Masatada (d. 1088) and Koremune Tomotoshi (fl. late thirteenth century). 16. Savage-Smith, “Medicine,” 926–27. al-Qānūn fī al-ṭibb [Canon of medicine]. 17. For a study of this and an exhaustive analysis of how al-Rāzī excerpts in volume 1 of al-Ḥāwī, see Jennifer Bryson, “The Kitāb al-Ḥāwī of Rāzī (ca. 900 AD), Book One of the Ḥāwī on Brain, Nerve, and Mental Disorders: Studies in the Transmission of Medical Texts from Greek into Arabic into Latin” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2000). 18. Savage-Smith, “Medicine,” 914–16. al-Kitāb al-manṣūrī fī al-ṭibb [The Manṣūrī on medicine]. 19. Al-Jāmīʿ al-kabīr [Large compendium]. 20. For the discussion, see Savage-Smith, “Working Files of Rhazes.” 21. Thābit ibn Qurra (d. 901), Kitāb al-dhakhīra fī ʿilm al-ṭibb [Treasure trove of medical knowledge]. 22. Bryson, “Kitāb al-Ḥāwī,” 74–91. 23. For example, see vol. 19, discourse 1, where al-Rāzī discusses bawl (urine) in the context of semiotics. See Al-Majūsī, Kitāb Kāmil al-s ̣ināʻah al-t ̣ibbīyah: al-maʻrūf bi-alMalakī (Yale University, 1437/1438 CE, Manuscript Arabic 4), f17v. For a discussion and translation of these comments, see Savage-Smith, “Medicine,” 918–19. 24. Kitāb kāmil al-ṣināʿa al-ṭibbīya [Complete book on the medical art]. 25. Savage-Smith, “Medicine,” 914–16. 26. For an example of practicable encyclopedism, see Khan, “Two Ibn Sīnās.” Here, it is argued that Ibn Sīnā’s Poem on Medicine (al-Urjūza fī al-ṭibb) is a practicable work, encyclopedic in its reach. These are both terms developed by the author for this particular meaning. 27. See Max Meyerhof, “Thirty-Three Clinical Observations by Rhazes (circa 900 A.D.),” Isis 23, no. 2 (1993), 321–72. Meyerhof translates thirty-three case histories he found in al-Rāzī’s Ḥāwī. 28. For an examination of commentaries, see Khaled el-Rouayheb, Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century: Scholarly Currents in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Although el-Rouayheb’s study is focused on a later period, many of his discussions are relevant to earlier periods. For a study of later encyclopedism, see Elias Muhanna, “Encyclopaedism in the Mamluk Period: The Composition of Shihāb al-Dīn al-Nuwayrī’s (d. 1333) Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2012). 29. ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī (d. 1231) and Ibn al-Nafīs (d. 1288). 30. For a discussion of this, see N. Peter Joosse and Peter E. Pormann, “Decline and Decadence in Iraq and Syria after the Age of Avicenna? ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī (1162–1231) between Myth and History,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 84 (2010), 1–29.

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31. See Fancy, Science and Religion, for an exhaustive study of Ibn al-Nafīs and his works. 32. Ibn Rushd (d. 1198). 33. See Fancy, Science and Religion, 25. 34. For a discussion of practicable knowledge, see Khan, “Two Ibn Sīnās” and especially its discussion on practice (18–23). 35. Wang Shumin, “Tangye jingfa (Canonical Methods for Brews and Decoctions): A Lost Text Recorded in the Hanshu Bibliography,” in Medieval Chinese Medicine, ed. Christopher Cullen and Vivienne Lo, 322–44 (London: Routledge, 2005), 323. See Harriet T. Zurndorfer, “The Passion to Collect, Select, and Protect: Fifteen Hundred Years of the Chinese Encyclopaedia,” in Encyclopaedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. Jason König and Greg Woolf, 505–61 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), for an introduction to encyclopedism in China. 36. For an introductory discussion to Ishinpō’s name, see Sugitatsu, Ishinpō no denrai, 284–85. See also Khan, “Early Japan,” ch. 1, for a similar discussion. 37. Japanese names are written in the order of last name, first name. Here, first names are used for consistency because of the three Tanbas in this discussion, as well as in following standard Japanese academic practice in referring to these individuals. 38. In historical records, other works are included before Ishinpō, such as Daidō ruijuhō 大同類聚方, but not only do none survive, but descriptions of these earlier texts show that they were not constructed as medical encyclopedias. 39. See Khan, “Early Japan,” ch. 2 for a detailed analysis of this. 40. Iryakushō [Synopsis of medicine (Ishinpō)]. 41. The surviving introduction and text is from the early modern period, but it can be found in three copies in Iryakushō, see Ishinpō zokuhen dai nana satsu 医心方 続編 第七冊, ed. Tanita Shinji 谷田伸治 and Nagano Hitoshi 長野仁 (Osaka: Oriento shuppansha, 1998), 15, 85, 163. 42. See a short discussion of this in ch. 3, Khan, “Early Japan,” which includes an analysis of how he does this with Ishinpō, vol. 3, on wind disease. 43. Khan, “Early Japan,” ch. 3. 44. Tanba no Yukinaga (d. ca. thirteenth century), Kanen yōshō [Essential selections on senescence]. 45. Idanshō [Selection of medical discussions]. 46. See Goble, Confluences of Medicine, for a study of Song period influences on Japanese medical literature. 47. Tomotoshi includes numerous references to works from the Song period. For a study of Idanshō, see Koremune Tomotoshi 惟宗倶俊, Idanshō 医談抄, ed. Minobe Shigekatsu 美濃部重克 (Tokyo: Miyai Shoten, 2006). 48. Kajiwara Shōzen (d. 1337); Man’anpō [Prescriptions of ten thousand reliefs] and Ton’ishō [Simple medical selections]. 49. For a full exposition on Kajiwara and his works, see Goble, Confluences of Medicine. 50. See Hattori Toshirō 服部敏郎, Heian jidai igakushi no kenkyū 平安時代医学史 の研究 (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 1955) for a discussion of those writers who lived

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in the Heian period. See also Shinmura Taku 新村拓 for a synoptic discussion of this in Japanese, Nihon no iryōshi 日本の医療史 (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 2006), esp. ch. 1 and 2 on medicine in the ancient and medieval periods. 51. See Khan, “Early Japan”; and Hattori, Heian jidai. 52. For example, see vol. 1 of Ishinpō, wherein its second half is a collection of drug names with their Japanese colloquial counterparts provided in an earlier form of characters called man’yōgana 万葉仮名. This type of writing was done by utilizing Chinese characters for their local Japanese pronunciation as well as for their meaning; in other words, it was a complicated method of transcribing Japanese text. For a discussion of early forms of writing in English, see David Lurie, Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011). 53. For a discussion of commissions and the process of translation, see Gutas, Greek Thought. 54. Ibn Rushd had access to Ibn Sīnā’s Poem and Qānūn within two centuries as proved by his commentaries. Moreover, al-Samarqandī’s discussion of writers, alMajūsī’s citation of al-Rāzī, and other facts clearly evidence the circulation of medical literature. 55. For an analysis of the institutionalization of medicine within Japan, see the studies of early Japanese medicine by Hattori Toshirō 服部敏郎, such as Hattori Toshirō, Heian jidai, and Hattori Toshirō, Nara jidai igakushi kenkyū 奈良時代医学 史研究 (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 1984). Although Hattori focuses on institutional history, he also examines the social and textual histories of medicine in Japan. 56. For a study of Ishinpō’s manuscripts, see Sugitatsu, Ishinpō no denrai, in which Sugitatsu conducts an exhaustive analysis of manuscripts and their recension histories. 57. Part of the problem with such an analysis is its generalization, which results from attempts to essentialize characteristics of a tradition with that of an individual writer or to take the actions of an individual writer to characterize a tradition. 58. See Savage-Smith, “Medicine” for a discussion on textual developments that focuses on Ibn Sīnā’s Canon and the development of literature thereafter. The use of al-Rāzī’s posthumous Ḥāwī later as a reference for study is evident in the work of the litératteur Aḥmad b. ʿUmar b. ʿAlī b. al-Niẓāmī al-ʿArūḍī al-Samarqandī (Khan, “Two Ibn Sīnās,” 5). 59. The significance is not in their difference, but about how writers in each tradition dealt with the situation presented to them—in other words, how they operated within their historical reality. 60. One classic example of such a categorization can be seen in the collection of talks by Owsei Temkin, Galenism: Rise and Decline of a Medical Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973). See a nuanced description of this in Emilie Savage-Smith, “Medicine in Medieval Islam,” in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 2: Medieval Science, ed. David Lindberg and Michael Shank, 139–67 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 147. See Khan, “Early Japan,” ch. 5, for a discussion of Japanese medicine and Ishinpō. 61. Whereas Gutas’s work (Greek Thought) is a thorough study of the translation movement, there exists no study of this flow of knowledge for the Japanese context in English. For an introduction to books in early Japan, see Peter Kornicki, The Book in

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Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998). For the best discussion in English on the influx of knowledge, see Masayoshi Sugimoto and David Swain, Science and Culture in Traditional Japan: A. D. 600–1854 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978). For a new comprehensive study of text and script throughout East Asia, see Peter Kornicki, Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 62. The point here is that commentaries were undertaken, but the shape and form were not the same in both traditions. For an introduction giving varying approaches to earlier authorities, see Lloyd, Adversaries and Authorities. 63. See el-Rouayheb, Islamic Intellectual History for a thorough study of this in the seventeenth century. 64. Categories are useful in providing a backdrop and contextualization for authors and traditions. However, if these categories function as restrictive labels, then it is difficult to separate modern bias from contemporary medieval or early modern approaches, as the latter were defined by their authors who might or might not have faithfully incorporated them in their own scholarship. For an introduction to how categories can distort realities, see ch, 8, “The Use and Abuse of Classification,” in G. E. R. Lloyd, Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections: Philosophical Perspectives on Greek and Chinese Science and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 93–117. Chapter 12. The Nesting Hypothesis for Planetary Distances 1. Bernard R. Goldstein, “The Arabic Version of Ptolemy’s Planetary Hypotheses,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 57, no. 4 (1967), 6–7. These passages are in book 1, part 2. For book 2, which does not survive in Greek, the best account is Andrea Murschel, “The Structure and Function of Ptolemy’s Physical Hypotheses of Planetary Motion,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 26 (1995), 33–61. 2. The orbs are spherical shells and, since they are all hollow, they can be nested in the manner of Russian dolls, or the layers of an onion, to use a medieval analogy: see, for example, Brethren of Purity, On Astronomia: Epistle 3, ed. and trans. F. Jamil Ragep and Taro Minura (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 26. 3. Goldstein, “Ptolemy’s Planetary Hypotheses,” 6. 4. Goldstein, “Ptolemy’s Planetary Hypotheses,” 6. 5. Goldstein, “Ptolemy’s Planetary Hypotheses,” 8. Ptolemy restated this general principle in book 2 of the Planetary Hypotheses: see Murschel, “Structure and Function,” 40. On discussions of the vacuum in ancient and medieval texts, see Edward Grant, Much Ado about Nothing: Theories of Space and Vacuum from the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Cf. the section “There Is Nothing Useless in Nature.” 6. For the principle that nature abhors a vacuum (here meaning gaps between the planetary orbs) in a medieval astronomical text, see On the Configuration of the World by Ibn al-Haytham (d. ca. 1040), where it is emphasized that there can be no vacuum in the universe, for it is a plenum. This work was translated from Arabic into Hebrew by Jacob ben Makhir Ibn Tibbon (ca. 1275) and into Latin three times in the Middle Ages:

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see Y. Tzvi Langermann, Ibn al-Haytham’s On the Configuration of the World (New York: Garland, 1990), 34, 40–41, 60. 7. In fact, the attribution of the Ptolemaic system to Ptolemy only became secure with the rediscovery of the Arabic version of this work by one of us: see Goldstein, “Ptolemy’s Planetary Hypotheses.” 8. Noel M. Swerdlow, “Al-Battānī’s Determination of the Solar Distance,” Centaurus 17 (1973), 97–105; Albert Van Helden, Measuring the Universe: Cosmic Dimensions from Aristarchus to Halley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 31–32, where some of the columns have been displaced vertically. For another list of al-Battānī’s planetary distances that partially overlaps with the list in Van Helden and does not suffer from this problem of displacement, see Noel M. Swerdlow and Otto Neugebauer, Mathematical Astronomy in Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus (New York: Springer, 1984), 559. 9. Mohammad Bagheri, Jan P. Hogendijk, and Michio Yano, “Kūshyār ibn Labbān Gīlānī’s Treatise on the Distances and Sizes of the Celestial Bodies,” Zeitschrift für Geschichte der arabisch-islamischen Wissenschaften 19 (2010–11), 87, 98–101. 10. Gerald J. Toomer, trans., Ptolemy’s Almagest (New York: Springer, 1984), 419. On parallax, see José Chabás and Bernard R. Goldstein, A Survey of European Astronomical Tables in the Late Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 127–28. 11. Bernard R. Goldstein and Noel M. Swerdlow, “Planetary Distances and Sizes in an Anonymous Arabic Treatise Preserved in Bodleian Ms. Marsh 621,” Centaurus 15 (1970–71), 135–70. Reprinted in Bernard R. Goldstein, Theory and Observation in Ancient and Medieval Astronomy (London: Variorum Reprints, 1985), essay 6, with an additional note at the end identifying the anonymous author as al-cUrḍī (thirteenth century). Van Helden, Measuring the Universe, 32–33. 12. Van Helden, Measuring the Universe, 29, 33. 13. Van Helden, Measuring the Universe, 34–36. See also Noel M. Swerdlow, “Ptolemy’s Theory of the Distances and Sizes of the Planets” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1968), 160–65. 14. Bernard R. Goldstein, “Levi ben Gerson on the Principles of Cosmology,” Aleph 12 (2012), 21, 33. The Planetary Hypotheses was translated from Arabic into Hebrew by Qalonymos ben Qalonymos in 1317, and is uniquely extant in Paris, MS Heb. 1028, ff. 54b–87a. 15. See Bernard R. Goldstein, The Astronomical Tables of Levi ben Gerson, Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 45 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1974), 74–80. See also Levi ben Gerson, Astronomy, in Bernard R. Goldstein, The Astronomy of Levi ben Gerson (1288–1344): A Critical Edition of Chapters 1–20 with Translation and Commentary (New York: Springer, 1985). Cf. José Luis Mancha, “Levi ben Gerson’s Astronomical Work: Chronology and Christian Context,” Science in Context 10 (1997), 471–93. Reprinted in José Luis Mancha, Studies in Medieval Astronomy and Optics (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), essay 4 (repaginated, 1–23). 16. Levi ben Gerson, Astronomy, ch. 17, in Goldstein, Astronomy of Levi ben Gerson, 105–6, 188. 17. Bernard R. Goldstein, “Levi ben Gerson and the Brightness of Mars,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 27 (1996), 298; cf. Philipp Melanchthon, Initia Doctrinae Physicae (Wittenberg: Lufft, [1549] 1550), 88r-v, for an observation in July 1529 of Mars when it was unusually large (inusitate magnitudine).

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18. See José Luis Mancha, “Astronomical Use of Pinhole Images in William of Saint-Cloud’s Almanach Planetarum,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences 43 (1992), 292–97. Reprinted in Mancha, Studies, essay 2. 19. See Almagest, III.4, in Toomer, Ptolemy’s Almagest, 153–57. 20. Bernard R. Goldstein, Al-Biṭrūjī: On the Principles of Astronomy, vol. 1: Analysis and Translation; vol. 2: The Arabic and Hebrew Versions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), 1:126, 140. Cf. Nicolas Copernicus, De revolutionibus (Nuremberg: Petreius, 1543), I.10; Edward Rosen, Nicholas Copernicus On the Revolutions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 18. 21. On Jābir ibn Aflaḥ, see Julio Samsó, Las Ciencias de los Antiguos en al-Andalus, 2nd ed. (Almería: Fundación Ibn Tufayl de Estudios Árabes, [1992] 2011), 326–30. 22. Bernard R. Goldstein, “Levi ben Gerson’s Theory of Planetary Distances,” Centaurus 29 (1986), 275. 23. Bernard R. Goldstein, “Some Medieval Reports of Venus and Mercury Transits,” Centaurus 14 (1969), 53, 58. Cf. Rosen, Nicholas Copernicus, 19, 356–57. 24. Goldstein, “Some Medieval Reports,” 54. In all probability Ibn Rushd’s report concerned large sunspots, but the concept of sunspots was only introduced by Galileo, based on his telescopic observations: cf. Giora Hon and Bernard R. Goldstein, From Summetria to Symmetry: The Making of a Revolutionary Scientific Concept (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008), 165–67. 25. See Bernard R. Goldstein and Peter Barker, “The Role of Rothmann in the Dissolution of the Celestial Spheres,” British Journal for History of Science 28 (1995), 390–91; Edward Grant, “Celestial Orbs in the Latin Middle Ages,” Isis 78 (1987), 153–73. 26. Levi, Astronomy, ch. 130, in Goldstein, “Levi ben Gerson’s Theory,” 286–88. 27. Goldstein, “Levi ben Gerson’s Theory,” 272. 28. The following analogy may be helpful, although Levi did not mention it. Consider the case of water flowing in a river: the water adjacent to the two banks has no motion relative to the banks, whereas the water in the middle of the river flows at some specific velocity. Hence, as the water increases in distance from one bank, its velocity also increases, reaching the maximum velocity in the middle of the river; the velocity then diminishes as the water approaches the other bank. To be sure, Levi’s fluid does the opposite, but the principle is the same. 29. Regiomontanus, Epytoma Ioannis de monte regio In almagestum ptolomei (Venice: Hamman, 1496), IX.1. Reprinted in Regiomontanus Opera Collectanea, ed. Felix Schmeidler (Osnabrück: Zeller, 1972), 192. On Regiomontanus, see Ernst Zinner, Regiomontanus: His Life and Work, trans. Ezra Brown (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1990). 30. Otto Neugebauer, “On the Planetary Theory of Copernicus,” Vistas in Astronomy 10 (1968), 89–103. Reprinted in Otto Neugebauer, Astronomy and History: Selected Essays (New York: Springer, 1983), 491–505. 31. Bernard R. Goldstein, “Copernicus and the Origin of His Heliocentric System,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 33 (2002), 227–28. 32. Cf. Neugebauer, “On the Planetary Theory,” 92. Reprinted in Neugebauer, Astronomy and History, 494. 33. Van Helden, Measuring the Universe, 44–46.

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34. Rosen, Nicholas Copernicus, 22. At a later time this led to the search for stellar parallax, a displacement of the observed position of a fixed star due to the size of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, which is very small and was only discovered in the nineteenth century. 35. Edward Rosen, Three Copernican Treatises (New York: Dover, [1939] 1959), 147. 36. For details, see Goldstein, “Copernicus and the Origin.” 37. John L. E. Dreyer, Tycho Brahe: A Picture of Scientific Life and Work in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Dover, [1890] 1963), 177. 38. Goldstein and Barker, “Role of Rothmann.” Cf. Bernard R. Goldstein and Giora Hon, “Kepler’s Move from Orbs to Orbits: Documenting a Revolutionary Scientific Concept,” Perspectives on Science 13 (2005), 74–111. 39. Anthony Grafton, “Michael Maestlin’s Account of Copernican Planetary Theory,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 117 (1973), 523–50. In 1596 Kepler referred to Maestlin’s short book on the comet of 1577 for providing one of the proofs in favor of the Copernican system: see Johannes Kepler, Mysterium Cosmographicum (Frankfurt: Erasmus Kempfer, [1596] 1621). Reprinted, with an added subtitle, The Secret of the Universe, together with translation and notes by Alistair M. Duncan (New York: Abaris Books, 1981), 79. 40. In the second edition of the Mysterium (1621) Kepler did not alter anything that was in the first edition (1596); rather, he added a set of comments to the first edition in light of his subsequent research. 41. Kepler, Mysterium, 65. 42. Kepler, Mysterium, 69. 43. Kepler, Mysterium, 97. 44. Kepler, Mysterium, 167, 246. See also Goldstein and Hon, “From Orbs to Orbits,” 80. 45. Kepler, Mysterium, 97–98. 46. Kepler, Mysterium, 157. 47. Liba Taub, Ptolemy’s Universe: The Natural Philosophical and Ethical Foundations of Ptolemy’s Astronomy (Chicago: Open Court, 1993), 135–44. 48. Bernard R. Goldstein, “Astronomy as a ‘Neutral Zone’: Interreligious Cooperation in Medieval Spain,” Medieval Encounters 15 (2009), 159–74. 49. More precisely, the primary goal of astronomy is to determine the positions of the planets in celestial longitude and latitude projected onto a unit sphere, whose center is the center of the Earth, at any given time. 50. Aristotle, On the Heavens, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, trans. John L. Stocks, vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, [1922/1984] 1995), 480. Cf. Aristotle, Progression of Animals, trans. Edward S. Forster (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 487: “One of these [general] principles is that nature never creates anything without purpose.” See also Devin Henry, “Optimality Reasoning in Aristotle’s Natural Theology,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 45 (2013), 229–35, and the literature cited there. We are grateful to Ruth Glasner (Jerusalem) and James Lennox (Pittsburgh) for their assistance in this matter. 51. Van Helden, Measuring the Universe, 18.

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52. This discovery was first reported by Johannes Kepler in his Harmonices Mundi libri v (Linz: Johann Planck, 1619), book 5, ch. 3, 189. Cf. Bernard R. Goldstein, “What’s New in Kepler’s New Astronomy?” In The Cosmos of Science: Essays of Exploration, ed. John Earman and John D. Norton, 3–23 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), 18–20. 53. One numerical agreement that led to a fundamental development in physics is James C. Maxwell’s discovery of the electromagnetic nature of light. In 1861 Maxwell wrote to William Thomson, “I made out the equations in the country before I had any suspicion of the nearness between the two values of the velocity of propagation of magnetic effects and that of light, so that I think I have reason to believe that the magnetic and luminiferous media are identical.” Peter M. Harman, The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, Vol. 1: 1846–1862 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 695. 54. Robert A. Millikan, The Electron (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1917), 210. 55. Millikan, Electron, 212. 56. See, for example, Werner Heisenberg, “Über quantentheoretische Umdeutung kinematischer und mechanischer Beziehungen,” Zeitschrift für Physik 33 (1925), 879–93. Translated into English in Sources of Quantum Mechanics, ed. Bartel L. Van der Waerden, 261–76 (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1967). 57. For discussion of cultural “appropriation and naturalization,” see Abdelhamid I. Sabra, “The Appropriation and Subsequent Naturalization of Greek Science in Medieval Islam: A Preliminary Statement,” History of Science 25 (1987), 223–43. 58. Margaret J. Osler, “Whose Ends? Teleology in Early Modern Science,” Osiris 16 (2001), 151–68. Chapter 13. Marāgha Observatory 1. George Saliba, A History of Arabic Astronomy: Planetary Theories during the Golden Age of Islam (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 252. 2. Rashīd al-Dīn Faḍlallāh Ṭabīb, Rashiduddin Fazlullah’s Jami’ u’t-tawarikh: Compendium of Chronicles: A History of the Mongols, vol. 3, translated and annotated by Wheeler M. Thackston, 501 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, 1998). 3. Aydin Sayılı, The Observatory in Islam and Its Place in the General History of the Observatory (Ankara: Türk Tahih Kurumu Basimevi, 1988), 193–94. 4. Carlos Dorce, “The Tāj al-azyāj of Muhyī al-Din al-Maghribī (d. 1283): Methods of Computation,” Suhayī 3 (2002–3), 193–212; George Saliba, “The Observatory Notebook of a Thirteenth-Century Astronomer,” Isis 74 (1983), 388–401. 5. Charles Burnett, “The Transmission of Science and Philosophy,” in The Cambridge World History, Volume 5: Expanding Webs of Exchange and Conflict, 500 CE–1500 CE, ed. Benjamin Z. Kedar and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, 339–58 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 348. 6. Sergei Tourkin, “Astronomical and Astrological Works in the Safina-yi Tabriz,” in The Treasury of Tabriz: The Great Il-Khanid Compendium, ed. A. A. Seyed-Gohrab and S. McGlinn, 185–205 (Amsterdam: Rozenberg, 2007), 205.

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7. M. Fuad Köprülü, “Marâga Rasanthanesi: Hakkinda Bâzi Notlar,” Belleten Türk Tarih Kurumu Basimevi 6, nos. 23–24 (1993), 207–27. 8. Sayılı, Observatory in Islam, 207–19. 9. Tabatabaie and Ali Ajabshirizadeh, “Observatories from Marâgha Observatory until Galileo’s Observations,” abstract in Astronomy and Its Instruments before and after Galileo, ed. Luisa Pigatto and Valeria Zanini (Padova: INAF Astronomical Observatory, 2009). 10. Pier Giorgio Borbone, “Marāgha mdittā arškitā: Syriac Christians in Marāgha under Mongol rule,” Egitto e Vicino Oriente 40 (2017), 117, 123, 128. 11. Tourkin, “Astronomical and Astrological Works,” 189, 191 (emphasis added). It should be noted here that nation as used in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries does not refer to nation-states. Instead, the term is fluid and signifies tribal, ethnic, and religious groupings sometimes identified with state affiliations. 12. Dorce, “Taj al-azyaj,” 194–96. 13. Moya Carey, “Mapping the Mnemonic: A Late Thirteenth-Century Copy of Al-Sufi’s Book of the Constellations,” in Arab Painting: Text and Image in Illustrated Arab Manuscripts, ed. Anna Contadini, figures 1–9 and page 66 (Leiden: Brill, 2010). 14. Persis Berlekamp, “From Iraq to Fars: Tracking Cultural Transformations in the 1322 Qazwini Aja’ ib Manuscript (The Wonders of Creation and the Oddities of Existence),” in Contadini, Arab Painting, 83. 15. Tourkin, “Astronomical and Astrological Works,” 194–95. 16. Tourkin, “Astronomical and Astrological Works,”196. 17. Tourkin, “Astronomical and Astrological Works,” 197–98. 18. Tourkin, “Astronomical and Astrological Works,” 203. 19. James A. Boyle, “The Longer Introduction to the ‘Ziji-i-Ilhani’ of Nasir-ad-Din Tūsī,” in Mongol World Empire 1206–1370, 245–54 (London: Varlorum Reprints, 1977), 253. 20. Ng Say Tiong, “Calendars, Interpolation, Gnomons and Armillary Spheres in the Work of Guo Shoujing (1231–1314),” Department of Mathematics (National University of Singapore, 2000/2001), 2, 27–28. 21. Boyle, “Longer Introduction,” 252. 22. Ramon Llull, A Contemporary Life, ed. and trans. Anthony Bonner (Barcelona: Tamesis Barcino, 2010), 39, 57. 23. Il-Seong Nha and Sarah I. Nha, “Two Historical Observatories before Galileo,” in Pigatto and Zanini, Astronomy and Its Instruments, 111–26. 24. Benno Van Dalen, “Islamic Astronomical Tables in China: The Sources for the Huihui Li,” in History of Oriental Astronomy, ed. S. M. Razaullah Ansari, 19–32 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2002). Burnett, “Transmission of Science and Philosophy,” 355. 25. Sayılı, Observatory in Islam, 375. 26. Peter Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 1221–1410 (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2005), 165–86. 27. Mercè Comes, “The Possible Scientific Exchanges between the Courts of Hulagu and Alfonso X,” in Sciences, techniques et instruments dans le monde Iranien, 29–49 (Tehran: Presses Universitaires d’Iran, 2004), 30–33. 28. Comes, “Possible Scientific Exchanges,” 33, 37, 44. 29. Rashīd al-Dīn Faḍlallāh Ṭabīb. Rashiduddin Fazlullah’s Jamiʻuʼt-Tawarikh, 513.

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30. Sayılı, Observatory in Islam, 366. 31. R. T. Gunther, Early Science in Cambridge (London: Dawson of Pall Mall, 1937), 138. An Arabic work on the astrolabe by Messahallah Ibn Athari (740–815) was the text used for several thirteenth-century translations into Latin from which Geoffrey Chaucer translated the first astrolabe textbook into English in 1391 (126–27). 32. Comes, “Possible Scientific Exchanges,” 43. 33. Michel Balard, La Romaine Genoise (Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 1978), 54, 57, 63–65. 34. Alain Demurger, Jacques de Molay (Paris: Payot, 2014), 146. 35. Carta Del Rey de Aragon Don Jayme Segundo, Escrita á Cassán Rey del Mogól, 19 de Mayo del año 1300. 36. Georg Zotti and S. Mohammad Mozaffari, “Ghazan Khan’s Astronomical Instruments at Maragha Observatory,” in Pigatto and Zanini, Astronomy and Its Instruments, 157–68. Also published as, S. Mohammad Mozaffari and Georg Zotti, “Ghazan Khan’s Astronomical Innovations at Maragha Observatory,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 132, no. 3 (2012), 395–425. 37. Rashīd al-Dīn Faḍlallāh Ṭabīb, Rashiduddin Fazlullah’s Jami’ u’t-tawarikh, 668. 38. R. T. Gunther, Early Science in Oxford (London: Dawson of Pall Mall, 1932), 2:29–30. 39. M. Minovi and V. Minorsky, “Nasir al-Din Tūsī on Finance,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 10, no. 3 (1940), 768. 40. Saliba, History of Arabic Astronomy, 278. 41. Viktor Blasio, “A Critique of the Arguments for Maragha Influence on Copernicus,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 45, no. 2 (2014), 193. 42. Avner Ben-Zaken, “The Heavens of the Sky and the Heavens of the Heart: The Ottoman Cultural Context for the Introduction of Post-Copernican Astronomy,” British Society for the History of Science 37, no. 1 (2004), 15. 43. Melissa Meriam Bullard, “The Inward Zodiac: A Development in Ficino’s Thought on Astrology,” Renaissance Quarterly 43, no. 4 (1990), 687–708. 44. Ben-Zaken, “Heavens of the Sky,” 1–7. 45. Dorce, “Taj al-azyaj,” 197. 46. Owen Gingerich, “Did Copernicus Owe a Debt to Aristarchus?” Journal of the History of Astrophysics 16 (1985), 37–42. Chapter 14. Reading between the Lines 1. Charles Burnett, Michio Yano, and Keiji Yamamoto, eds., Al-Qabisi (Alcabitius): The Introduction to Astrology (London: Warburg Institute, 2004), henceforth abbreviated as BYY; Rüdiger Arnzen, “Vergessene Pflichtlektüre: al-Qabīṣīs astrologische Lehrschrift im europäischen Mittelalter,” Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften 13 (1999), 93–128; Charles Burnett, “Al-Qabīsī’s Introduction to Astrology: From Courtly Entertainment to University Textbook,” in Studies in the History of Culture and Science: A Tribute to Gad Freudenthal, ed. Resianne Fontaine, 43–70 (Leiden: Brill, 2011). As this article focuses on the Latin reception of the work, I use the Latinized Alcabitius to refer to the author, and the Introduction refers to the text.

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2. David Juste, “The Impact of Arabic Sources on European Astrology: Some Facts and Numbers,” Micrologus 24 (2016), 173–94. See especially Tables 2 and 2a on p. 179, which indicate the perceived origin (by medieval readers) versus the real origin (as established by modern authors) of astrological manuscripts. 3. George Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science, 3 vols. (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1927–48); Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927); Charles Homer Haskins, Studies in the History of Mediaeval Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927). 4. The work of Abdelhamid I. Sabra on Islamic science and Charles Burnett on the influence of the Islamic tradition in the West have been especially important in this slow transition for historians of science. See Sabra, “The Appropriation and Subsequent Naturalization of Greek Science in Medieval Islam: A Preliminary Statement,” History of Science 25 (1987), 223–43, and “Situating Arabic Science: Locality versus Essence,” Isis 87, no. 4 (1996), 654–70. For the influence of the Arabic tradition in medieval Europe, see Charles Burnett, Arabic into Latin in the Middle Ages: The Translators and their Intellectual and Social Context (Farnham: Variorum, 2009); see also Charles Butterworth and Blake Kessel, eds., The Introduction of Arabic Philosophy into Europe (Leiden: Brill, 1994); Hans Daiber, Islamic Thought in the Dialogue of Cultures: A Historical and Bibliographical Survey (Leiden: Brill, 2012); Andreas Speer and Lydia Wegener, eds., Wissen über grenzen: arabisches wissen und lateinisches mittelalter, Miscellanea Mediaevalia 33 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006). 5. One recent example is A. Mark Smith’s From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), in which he considers the Islamic optical tradition only insofar as it contributes to the Western narrative, and especially to modern optics. 6. Sonia Brentjes, Alexander Fidora, and Matthias Tischler, “Towards a New Approach to Medieval Cross-Cultural Exchanges,” Journal of Transcultural Medieval Studies 1, no. 1 (2014), 12–13. 7. For the case of astrology, for example, see Charles Burnett, Michio Yano, and Keiji Yamamoto, eds., The Abbreviation of the Introduction to Astrology, Together with the Medieval Latin Translation of Adelard of Bath (Leiden: Brill, 1994); Keiji Yamamoto and Charles Burnett, eds., Abū Maʻshar on Historical Astrology, The Book of Religions and Dynasties (On the Great Conjunctions), 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2000). 8. F. Jamil Ragep, Sally Ragep, and Steven Livesey, eds., Tradition, Transmission, Transformation: Proceedings of Two Conferences on Premodern Science at the University of Oklahoma (Leiden: Brill, 1996); Robert Wisnovsky, Faith Wallis, Jamie Claire Fumo, and Carlos Fraenkel, eds., Vehicles of Transmission, Translation, and Transformation in Medieval Textual Culture (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011). 9. The first major study on the topic of early modern European perceptions and attitudes toward Arabic learning is Dag Nikolaus Hasse, Success and Suppression: Arabic Sciences and Philosophy in the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 10. Adelard of Bath, Conversations with His Nephew: On the Same and the Different, Questions on Natural Science, and on Birds, ed. and trans. Charles Burnett with

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the collaboration of Italo Ronca, Pedro Mantas España, and Baudouin van den Abeele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 83, 91. 11. Karla Mallette, European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean: Toward a New Philology and a Counter-Orientalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 34–64. 12. Pico della Mirandola, Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem, 2 vols., ed. Eugenio Garin (Florence: Vallecchi, 1946–52), 1:572. Alcabitius’s Introduction is listed in Pico’s library. See Pearl Kibre, The Library of Pico della Mirandola (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936). 13. Albertus Pighius, Adversus prognosticatorum vulgus, qui annuas predictiones edunt, et se astrologos mentiuntur, astrologiae defensio (Paris: Henricus Stephanus, 1518), 5v. 14. Germana Ernst, “‘Veritatis amor dulcissimus’: Aspects of Cardano’s Astrology,” in Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Grafton and William Newman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 47. 15. Girolamo Cardano, De astrorum judiciis (Basel: Henricus Petri, 1554), A 2v. Translation from Ernst, “‘Veritatis amor dulcissimus,’” 47. 16. Much of the theoretical background to using marginalia as evidence of readership is from a literary perspective. Some general themes are addressed in K. Kerby-Fulton and M. Hilmo, eds., The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe, and Gower (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria Press, 2001); Ian Moulton, ed., Reading and Literacy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004); M. B. Parkes, “Reading, Copying and Interpreting a Text in the Early Middle Ages,” in A History of Reading in the West, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo, Roger Chartier, and Lydia Cochrane, 90–102 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999). 17. A near-complete list of both Latin and Arabic manuscripts is available in BYY. 18. There are three reasons that some manuscripts were left out: there were no marginalia at all; too much of the marginalia were illegible; the marginalia are limited to subject headings or minor notes on a few pages. 19. Paola Zambelli, The Speculum Astronomiae and Its Enigma: Astrology, Theology, and Science in Albertus Magnus and His Contemporaries, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 135 (Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1992). Albertus cites several astrological authors in compiling his list of licit and illicit astrological texts. In no particular order, these are: Ptolemy, Messahala, Geber, Albategni, Albumasar, Alchabitius, Johannes Hispalensis, Haly, Zael, Alkindi, Jafar, and others. 20. The annotator does not provide titles for the texts, only the name Albumasar with the book and section number for the Abbreviation and the name Albumasar for the Great Introduction. 21. In my analysis I include a set of annotations from early in the Latin textual tradition that have been recorded in the modern critical edition from Reg. lat. 1285. According to the BYY edition, these annotations were made by a diligent and critical reviser of the text, who knew Arabic and sought to improve the translated text by providing alternative translations or explanatory phrases in the margins. This set of annotations has been copied into at least eight other manuscripts. Following the

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BYY edition, I refer to this set of annotations as the Gloss and to their author as the Glossator. See BYY, 216–20. 22. Alcabitius, Introductorius [1:18, 90]: “Et si duo planete fuerint in uno signo, coniuncti dicuntur,” 235. 23. Burnett, Yamamoto, and Yano note that a later hand added the Gloss to MS G (British Library, Harley 13). See BYY, 168. The Gloss reads: “Nam (Zael G) coniunctio est quando duo planete coniunguntur in uno signo et (+ si G) fuerint inter eos .15. gradus vel infra, hic (quia .15. G) est terminus coniunctionis.” See Alcabitius, Introductorius [1:18, 90], 235. 24. BAV, Vat. lat. 4079, f. 41vb, “aspectus dicit est de signo ad signum ualidissimus de gradu ad gradum ut dicit albumasar.” 25. BAV, Pal. lat. 1372: “Que dicitur potestas a Johanni Hyspalensi,” f. 8v. 26. Haly’s method is preferred by the annotator. The annotations are in Museo Correr, MS Cicogna 3747, 52v. 27. Bibl. Laurenziana, Plut. 29.3, 12v. 28. Dmitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ‘Abbasid Society (2nd–4th/8th–10th Centuries) (New York: Routledge, 1998); Franz Rosenthal, The Classical Heritage in Islam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). 29. Much of this knowledge had been preserved in Syriac manuscripts. The extent of Syriac scientific and philosophical activity in the late Hellenic and early medieval period is still being investigated. 30. The major sources of astronomical information in medieval Europe prior to the translations were Martianus Capella, Calcidius’s commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, and Macrobius, in addition to the basic description of the heavens in Isidore’s Etymologies. For astronomical theory and practice, see Bruce Eastwood, Ordering the Heavens: Roman Astronomy and Cosmology in the Carolingian Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2007) and Stephen McCluskey, Astronomies and Cultures in Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). For astrology, there was much less, and it was unrelated to the calculation of planetary positions. See David Juste, Les Alchandreana primitifs: Étude sur les plus anciens traités astrologiques latins d’origine arabe (Xe siècle) (Leiden: Brill, 2007). 31. Charles Burnett, “Astrology,” in Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide, ed. Frank Mantello and A. G. Rigg, 369–82 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1996). 32. Dag Hasse holds that there is no firm evidence of this from Andalusian contexts. Dag Nikolaus Hasse, “The Social Conditions of the Arabic-(Hebrew)-Latin Translation Movements in Medieval Spain and the Renaissance,” in Speer and Wegener, Wissen über Grenzen, 68–86. Arianna Borelli argues that there was some form of oral tradition transmitted as early as the tenth century, based on evidence from treatises on astrolabes and astrolabes themselves. See Arianna Borrelli, Aspects of the Astrolabe “Architectonica Ratio” in Tenth- and Eleventh-Century Europe, Sudhoffs Archiv. Beihefte 57 (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 2008). For the case of Adelard of Bath and Stephen the Philosopher and Arabic teachers, see Charles Burnett, “Translation and Transmission

NOTES TO PAGES 252–256

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of Greek and Islamic Science to Latin Christendom,” in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 2: Medieval Science, ed. D. Lindberg and M. Shank, 341–64 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 33. The same questions may be asked about transliterated terms in Arabic medical and philosophical texts and annotations made by Latin readers, and the extent to which Latin scholars integrated technical terminology into Latin knowledge practices. 34. The spelling here replicates the 1512 printed edition of the Introduction. The manuscript variants are as follows: Hyleg variants: hilesg, hilel, hiles, hyles, yles, hilegh, yle, hiselesg, elhyleg, hyleg, hylech, hylez (see BYY, 319); Alcochoden variants: alquodchodeuh, alkudchudech, alquodhodeu, aliq(uod)hodeu, aliq(uod) hodeu, alchocodeu, alchoden, alcocodeu, aliq(uo)dchodeu, alcogodeu, alcodcodeu, acozcodeu, alcochodeu, alcochoden (see BYY, 323). 35. BYY, 319: “id est locus vite.” The English term used by BYY is “prorogator.” 36. BYY, 323: “quod est signficator vite.” 37. Although the origin of this gender distinction is not clear, it does appear in Masha’allah’s Book on Eclipses. See Abraham Ibn Ezra, The Book of the World: A Parallel Hebrew-English Critical Edition of the Two Versions of the Text, ed. and trans. Shlomo Sela (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 253. 38. The Latin text reads: “hylak interpretatur uxor et est dispositor annorum nati ad bonum uel malum uel ad infirmitatem [uel] sanitatem et filiam,” BAV, Pal. lat. 1372, 8va. In the case of alcochoden, the annotator has written, “Alkocoden interpretatur uir et est dator annorum nati,” BAV, Pal. lat. 1372, 8ra. 39. Abū Maʻshar, On Historical Astrology: The Book of Religions and Dynasties (on the Great Conjunctions), ed. Keiji Yamamoto and Charles Burnett (Leiden: Brill, 2000). 40. BAV, Vat. lat. 4079, 49va: “et fuerit coniunctio saturni et iovis quia hic coniunctio habet significare mutationem fidei et mutationem regni . . . incepit tunc secta saracenorum.” 41. “What we have shown about the Saracen sect can also be shown about other sects. . . . But it is not fitting to talk much about this material. For it is something which does not agree with our faith.” Quoted in Burnett, “Al-Qabīsī’s Introduction to Astrology, 59. The theological issues surrounding conjunctions have been well-documented in Graziella Federici Vescovini, “The Theological Debate,” in A Companion to Astrology in the Renaissance, ed. Brendan Dooley (Leiden: Brill, 2004). 42. Burnett et al. suggest that the fact that the Glossator refers to Albumasar’s work De magnis coniunctionibus by its Arabic title, which does not appear in any other Latin manuscript, means that the Glossator added his marginalia prior to the translation of this work. See BYY, Introduction, 202, esp. note 20. 43. The lot is the “pars tritici” and appears uniquely in Introduction, ch. 5, sect. 19. See BYY, Introduction, 201, esp. note 12. 44. The date inscription reads: “Perfectus introductorius liber Alcabisii ad magisterium iudiciorum astrorum octavo die mensis Ianuarii tercie indicionis annis Domini perfectis. 1181.” The editors argue that the date does not make sense, since John of Seville was active in the 1120s and 1130s, and the third indiction does not cor-

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respond to either 1181 or 1181 of the Spanish era (1143). See BYY, Introduction, 201. Due to the illegibility of much of the marginalia, I did not include this manuscript in my analysis. 45. Contemporary scholarship has cast doubt on this attribution. See Jeremiah Hackett, “Albert the Great and the Speculum astronomiae: The State of Research at the Beginning of the 21st Century,” in A Companion to Albert the Great: Theology, Philosophy, and the Sciences, ed. Irven Michael Resnick, 437–50 (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 46. These two layers of interpretation are suggested by the editors of the BYY edition. The passage reads, “Quid iterum meruit liber Abdilaziz quem uoca(n)t Alkabitium, qui similiter cum iniquis deputatus est? Si sunt in textu eius nomina ignotae linguae, statim subduntur in lettera interpretationes eorum; quod si forte aliquorum interpretationes defuerint, paratus est vir earum copiam exhibere.” Quoted from BYY, Introduction, 209n33. See also Zambelli, Speculum Astronomiae and Its Enigma, 256. 47. Burnett writes, “It cannot be by chance that John of Saxony’s canons to the Alfonsine Tables and his commentary on al-Qabisi composed within four years of each other, both immediately established themselves as their ‘set texts’ in their respective subjects. This suggests that the two works were part of the same syllabus in teaching astronomy in Paris.” See Burnett, “Al-Qabīsī’s Introduction to Astrology,” 53. 48. See Lynn Thorndike, University Records and Life in the Middle Ages (New York: Macmillan, 1923), 2:251. See also Graziella Federici Vescovini, “I programmi degli insegnamenti del Collegio di medicina, filosofia e astrologia dello statuto dell’universita’ di Bologna del 1405,” in Roma, magistra mundi: Itineraria culturae medievalis, Mélanges offerts au Père L. E. Boyle, 2 vols., 1:193–223 (Louvain: La Neuve, 1998). 49. “Hic liber est mei federici delfini quem donavit mihi dominus bartolameus cherubinus phisicus socius meus,” Bibl. Laurenziana, MS Ash. 208. 50. Museo Correr, MS Cicogna 3747, “Coniunctio uero latitudinis est uel planete iungantur per latitudinem . . . coniunctio uero latitudinies est non [?] planete iungantur per longitudinem,” 56r. 51. Roger French, “Astrology in Medical Practice,” in Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death, ed. Luis García-Ballester, Roger French, Jon Arrizabalaga, and Andrew Cunningham, 30–59 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Nancy Siraisi, Medieval and Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 52. “Laurentii Bonincontrii Miniatensis commentum super Centilogo ptholomei feliciter explicit; Transcriptum per Me Laurentium Silvestri Canonicum ecclisie sancti Laurentii florentium die x may 1477. hora 231/2.” Biblioteca Laurenziana, MS Plut. 29.3. 53. The notion of the “afterlife” of a text, as noted by Patrick Manning in the Introduction to this volume, is from Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 1913—1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, 253–63 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 54. This is not to be confused with the astrological term. 55. Sabra, “Situating Arabic Science,” 658. 56. Sabra, “Situating Arabic Science,” 658.

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Chapter 15. The Fourteenth-Century Transformation in China’s Reception of Arabo-Persian Astronomy 1. Zhu Yuanzhang, known also as the Hongwu 洪武 emperor, became the first emperor of the Ming 明 dynasty in 1368. 2. Abdelhamid I. Sabra, “The Appropriation and Subsequent Naturalization of Greek Science in Medieval Islam: A Preliminary Statement,” History of Science 25 (1987), 223–43. 3. It should be noted that during the eighth century, Indian astronomy played an important role at the Tang court. See Tansen Sen, “Gautama Zhuan: An Indian Astronomer At the Tang Court,” China Report 31, no. 2 (1995), 197–208; Yabuuti Kiyosi, “Researches on the Chiu-Chih Li: Indian Astronomy under the T’ang Dynasty,” Acta Asiatica: Bulletin of the Institute of Eastern Culture 36 (1979), 7–48. 4. See Reuven Amitai-Preiss, “Hülegü and His Wise Men: Topos or Reality?” In Politics, Patronage and the Transmission of Knowledge in 13th–15th Century Tabriz, ed. Judith Pfeiffer, 15–35 (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 5. See Thomas T. Allsen, Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 175; Nathan Sivin, Granting the Seasons: The Chinese Astronomical Reform of 1280, with a Study of Its Many Dimensions and a Translation of Its Records (New York: Springer Science and Business Media, 2008), 22–23. 6. Jamāl al-Dīn was mentioned in Chinese records as Zha-ma-la-ding 扎馬剌丁 (spelled also as Zha-ma-lu-ding 札瑪魯鼎, among others). On the identification of Zhama-lu-ding, see Benno van Dalen, “Zhamaluding: Jamāl Al-Dīn Muḥammad Ibn Ṭāhir Ibn Muḥammad Al-Zaydī Al-Bukhārī,” in Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers, ed. Thomas Hockey et al., 1262–63 (New York: Springer, 2007). The Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh mentioned that Jamāl al-Dīn was originally appointed by Möngke to set up the Marāgha Observatory, yet seems to have failed to do so. Later, Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī took over the establishment of the observatory in Marāgha. See Rashīd al-Dīn Faḍlallāh Ṭabīb, Jāmi‘ al-tawārīkh (Tehran: Iqbāl, [1338] 1959), 718. A biography of Zha-ma-lu-ding appears in Ruan Yuan 阮元, Chouren zhuan 疇人傳 [Biographies of astronomers], Xuxiu siku quanshu 續修四庫全書 edition, vol. 516 (Shanghai guji chubanshu, 1995–99), 24:2. 7. A list of the astronomical instruments that Jamāl al-Dīn brought with him to China appears in Song Lian 宋濂, Yuanshi 元史 [The history of the Yuan] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1976), 48:998. The list includes the transliterated Persian names of the instruments and Chinese translation. See Dalen, “Zhamaluding” 1262–63. Although the original works of Jamāl al-Dīn are unknown, historians have proposed several suggestions for the identification of these Arabic and Persian sources. 8. See Dalen, “Zhamaluding,” 1262–63. 9. Wang Shidian 王士點 and Shang Qiweng 商企翁, Mishu zhi 秘書志 [Annals of the Imperial Archival Bureau], juan 7, undated chirograph, National Central Library (Taipei), item no. 04190. 10. He is said to have mastered the main languages of Western Asia. Yuanshi 134:3249. 11. The list is included in the fourteenth-century work, titled Mishujian zhi 秘書監 志 [The annals of the Imperial Library]. The list is divided into two sections, the first refers to books housed at the bureau (bentai xian heyong jing 本臺現合用經), and the

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second to books held at the residence of the bureau’s superintendent (tidian guanjia nei zhuban he shiyong wenshu 提點官家內諸般合使用文書). There are several versions of this list and it seems that the transliterations in the text went through revisions. During the second half of the eighteenth century, several philologists, led by Wang Huizu 汪 輝祖 (1730–1807) and Qian Daxin 錢大昕 (1728–1804) attempted to reconstruct and unify the foreign (mainly Mongolian) transliterations in the Dynastic History of the Yuan [Yuanshi 元史, originally ca. 1369], as well as in other Yuan dynasty documents. It is reasonable to believe that the alteration in our text goes back to the same project. However, as the reconstructors seem not to have noticed that the titles in this text are Persian, the result of their transliteration, which was included in the official version of the text in the imperial project of “The Four Treasures Compendium” (Siku Quanshu 四庫全書), is utterly flawed and unreadable. Earlier versions, such as the one found by Wang Guowei 王國維 (1877–1929) in the library of the Cangsheng Mingzhi University 倉聖明智大學 in Shanghai, present us with the pre-reconstructed text. In what follows, I use a facsimile version of an undated manuscript, published by Jiangsu Guangling Guji keyin chubanshe 江蘇廣陵古籍刻印出版社 in 1988. 12. The meaning of bu 部 (part) is unclear. Other documents in that compilation make use of this term together with the term “ce” 冊 (volume; booklet). It seems that the latter refers to actual volumes, while the former refers to a certain division of the work into larger units, maybe in the form of packs or cases. 13. The title might refer to the commentary of Abū ‘Alī Muḥammad b. al-Ḥassan b. al-Haytham al-Baṣrī on Euclid’s Elements by the same title. 14. This entry seems to refer to the tenth-century Arabic work titled Ṣuwar alKawākib by ‘Abd al-Raḥmān al-Ṣūfī (d. 986). Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūṣī translated this work into Persian. The list indicates that the work comprised four parts in accordance with Ṣūfī’s work. 15. This entry might refer to the ninth-century work, Kitāb al-ḥiyal [The book of devices], an illustrated work on mechanical devices (ca. 850). 16. See Ma Jian 馬堅, ”Yuan mishujian zhi ‘huihui shuji’ shiji” 元秘書監志“回回 書籍” 釋義 [Interpreting “The List of Islamic Books” in Yuan’s Annal of the Imperial Archive], Guangming ribao 7, no. 7 (1955), 193–98; Tasaka Kōdō 田坂興道, “An Aspect of Islam Culture Introduced into China,” Memoirs of the Research Department of the Toyo Bunko (The Oriental Library) 16 (1957), 75–160. 17. This work is preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. On this Persian manuscript, see Dror Weil, “Islamicated China: China’s Participation in the Islamicate Book Culture during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Histories of Books in the Islamicate World: Intellectual History of the Islamicate World, vol. 4, ed. Sabine Schmidtke, Maribel Fierro, and Sarah Stroumsa, 36–60 (Leiden: Brill, 2016). 18. Also preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. On this Arabic manuscript, see Benno van Dalen and Michio Yano, “Islamic Astronomy in China: Two New Sources for the Huihui li (‘Islamic Calendar’),” Highlights of Astronomy 11B (1998), 698–99; Herbert Franke, “Mittelmongolische Glossen in einer Arabischen astronomischen Handschrift von 1366,” Oriens 31 (1988), 95–118. See also Benno van Dalen, “Islamic and Chinese Astronomy under the Mongols: A Little-Known Case

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of Transmission,” in From China to Paris: 2000 Years Transmission of Mathematical Ideas, ed. Yvonne Dold-Samplonius, J. W. Dauben, F. Menso, and B. van Dalen, 327–56 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2002), 340–43. 19. This catalogue numbering system is based on the traditional poem known as Thousand Character Classic (Qianziwen 千字文). The characters of the poem served as a system of cataloguing. The History of the Yuan suggests that, after 1260, this system was used in cataloguing documents in imperial offices. See Yuanshi 101:2597; Franke, “Mittelmongolische,” 98. I thank Zhang Xue of Princeton University for pointing this out. 20. On Zhu Yuanzhang’s policies and their relation to those of the Yuan, see Henry Serruys, “Remains of Mongol Customs in China during the Early Ming Period,” Monumenta Serica 16 (1957), 137–90; David M. Robinson, “The Ming Court and the Legacy of the Yuan Mongols,” in Culture, Courtiers, and Competition: The Ming Court (1368–1644), ed. Robinson, 365–422 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 21. Wu Bozong 吳伯宗 reports this in his preface to The Book on Arabo-Persian Astronomy [Huihui tianwen shu 回回天文書], see Mingyi Tianwenshu 明譯天文書 [The Ming translation of the Book of Astronomy], in Qingzhen Dadian 清真大典 [The complete corpus of Chinese Islamic literature], ed. Huang Xiefan 周燮藩 et al., 21:295–392 (Hefei shi: Huangshan shushe, 2005), 21:296–98. 22. Mingshilu, Taizu shilu 35:636, Hongwu 1/10/27 [December 7, 1368]; Mingshilu, Taizu shilu 37:710, Hongwu 1/12/14; Mingshi, 31:515–16. A similar account is recorded in Ruan Yuan, Chouren Zhuan, 29:1b. 23. Mingshilu, Taizu shilu 35:636, Hongwu 1/10/27 [December 7, 1368]; Mingshilu, Taizu shilu 37:710, Hongwu 1/12/14; Mingshi, 31:515–16. A similar account is recorded in Ruan Yuan, Chouren Zhuan, 29:1b. 24. Hongwu jingcheng tuzhi 洪武京城圖志 [Map of the imperial capital of the Hongwu reign] (Nanjing: Nanjing chuban she, 2011), 11. 25. Shi Yunli, “Islamic Astronomy in the Service of Yuan and Ming Monarchs,” International Journal for the History of the Exact and Natural Sciences in Islamic Civilisation 13 (2014), 41–61. 26. Mingshi, 31:515. 27. The Hanlin Academy (Hanlin yuan 翰林院) was a body of high-ranking scholars, set up by the first Ming emperor to serve as his advisers. Its responsibilities and structures were changed in 1407 under the Yongle emperor. 28. The Chinese term tianwen 天文 can be translated as astrology as well. The book was known also as Mingyi tianwen shu 明譯天文書 [The Ming translation of the “Book of Astronomy”]. In his preface to the Mingyi tianwen shu, Wu Bozong, the Hanlin academic who oversaw the translation project, named the author of the original Arabic work as “the wiseman Kuo-shi-ya-er” 闊識牙耳大賢者. Michio Yano identified the work as Kūshyār b. Labbān’s Arabic treastise al-Madkhal fī ṣinā‘at aḥkām al-nujūm (The introduction to the art of astrology, known also as Mujmal al-’uṣūl fī aḥkām al-nujūm; Compendium of astrological principles). Mingyi Tianwenshu, 21: 296. On Kūshyār work and its Chinese translation, see Michio Yano, ed. Kūšyār Ibn Labbān’s Introduction to Astrology (Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, 1997).

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29. Mingyi Tianwenshu, 21:296 30. On the violent clashes and the terrorizing policies of Zhu Yuanzhang, see John D. Langlois Jr., “The Hung-Wu Reign, 1368–1398,” in The Cambridge History of China, Volume 7: The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, Part 1, ed. Denis C. Twitchett and John K. Fairbank, 149–81 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 31. Chen Zilong 陳子龍, ed., Mingjing shiwen bian 明經世文編 (Beijing: Zhonghua shu ju, 1962), 4:32. 32. The History of the Ming mentioned functionaries subordinate to officers at the astronomical observatory who were still using the books of their original lands.” Mingshi, 37:745. 33. Ruan Yuan, Chouren Zhuan, 516:288; Mingshilu, Xianzong shilu 171:3093, Chenghua 13/10/1 [November 6, 1477]. 34. Mingshi, 37:745. 35. See Ruan Yuan, Chouren Zhuan 516:292–93 and 516:298–99. On the application of Arabo-Persian astronomy in the seventeenth century, see Shi Yunli and Zhu Haohao, “Calculating the Fate of Chinese Dynasties with the Islamic Method: The Chinese Study and Application of Arabic Astrology in the 17th Century,” Micrologus 24 (2016), 311–35. 36. Shi Yunli, “Islamic Astronomy,” 41–61. On the Korean publication, entitled “Chiljeongsan Naepyeon” 七政算外篇 [The outer chapters of the “Seven Governors” computing], see Eun Hee Lee, “Korean Astronomical Calendar, Chiljeongsan,” in Handbook of Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy, ed. Clive L. N. Ruggles, 2157–62 (New York: Springer, 2015). 37. Chen Zhanshan 陳占山, ed., ‘Bu deyi’: fu erzhong ‘不得已’: 附二种 [“No more”: with two attachments] (Anhui: Huangshan shushe, 2000). On the historical context of the dispute, see Benjamin A. Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China 1550–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 134–44. Chapter 16. Celestial Navigation 1. Carlos Malheiro Dias, “A Expedição de 1501” and “A Expedição de 1503,” in Carlos Malheiro Dias, Ernesto Julio de Castro e Vasconcellos, and Alfredo Roque Gameiro, História da colonização portuguesa, 3 vols. (Porto: Litografia Nacional, 1921–24), vol. 1, ch. 8 and 10. Henry Harrisse, Les Corte-Real et leurs voyages au Nouveau-Monde d’après des documents nouveaux ou peu connus tirés des Archives de Lisbonne et de Modène (Paris: E. Leroux, 1883). 2. Carta del Cantino, Biblioteca Estense, Modena. The history and timing of the map’s production also appear in manuscripts in the Biblioteca Estense. Ernesto Milano and Alberto Cantino, La carta del Cantino e la rappresentazione della terra nei codici e nei libri a stampa della Biblioteca estense e universitaria (Modena: Il Bulino, 1991). 3. Information from my younger brother, Brian Seed, professor of genetics and molecular biology, Harvard Medical School-Massachusetts General Hospital. 4. As of July 1, 2017, the National Institutes of Health had 28 databases and 235,741 published articles on the subject of “translational science.” 5. David A. King, In Synchrony with the Heavens: Studies in Astronomical Time-

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keeping and Instrumentation in Medieval Islamic Civilization (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 204. 6. Glen Van Brummelen, The Mathematics of the Heavens and the Earth: The Early History of Trigonometry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 7. One of the best known examples is the translation by Prophatius Judeus of al-Zarqali’s thirteenth-century treatise on the universal astrolabe, a work that is still known by its Hebrew name. Richard I. Harper, “Prophatius Judaeus and the Medieval Astronomical Tables,” Isis 62 (1971), 61–68. An earlier example is Marco Zuccato, “Gerbert of Aurillac and a Tenth-Century Jewish Channel for the Transmission of Arabic Science to the West,” Speculum 80 (2005), 742–63. 8. Abraham bar Hiyya Savasorda [1070–1145], Tsurat ha-arets. Latin & Hebrew Sphaera mundi autore Abrahamo Hispano filio R. Haijae. Arithmetica secundum omnes species suas autore Elija Orientali. Quos libros Osvualdus Schreckenfuchsius uertit in linguam latinam, Sebastianus uero Munsterus illustrauit annotationibus (Amsterdam: B. R. Grüner, 1968). The Christian Hebraisist Sebastian Muenster originally published this work in 1546 and again in 1548. Sebastian Muenster, Tsurat ha-arets. Latin & Hebrew Sphaera mundi autore Abrahamo Hispano filio R. Haijae. Arithmetica secundum omnes species suas autore Elija Orientali. Quos libros Osvualdus Schreckenfuchsius uertit in linguam latinam, Sebastianus uero Munsterus illustrauit annotationibus (Amsterdam: B. R. Grüner, 1968). See also José Sangrador Gil, La escuela de traductores de Toledo y los colaboradores judíos (Toledo: Instituto Provincial de Investigaciones y Estudios Toledanos, Diputación Provincial, 1985). A similar translation project started in Zaragossa immediately after its capture in 1118 by Alfonso I of Aragon. “Translations, Scientific, Philosophical and Literary (Arabic),” in Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia, ed. E. Michael Gerli (New York: Routledge, 2003), 801. A surviving example of the Zaragossa translations is in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence. Charles Burnett, “The Coherence of the Arabic-Latin Translation Programme in Toledo in the Twelfth Century,” Science in Context 14 (2001), 249–88 . 9. For an excellent review of the historiography of this process, see Thomas Glick, “Translation Movements,” in Medieval Science, Technology, and Medicine: An Encyclopedia, ed. Thomas Glick, Steven John Livesey, and Faith Wallis, 482–86 (New York: Routledge, 2005); see also Charles Burnett, “The Institutional Context of Arabic-Latin Translations of the Middle Ages: A Reassessment of the ‘School of Toledo,’” in The Vocabulary of Teaching and Research between the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Olga Weijers, 214–35 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995); Burnett, “The Translation Activity in Medieval Spain,” in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, 1036–58 (Leiden: Brill, 1994); Burnett, “Coherence of the Arabic-Latin Translation Programme”; and Francisco Márquez Villanueva, El Concepto Cultural Alfonsí (Toledo: Ediciones Bellaterra, 2004). 10. Anthony John Cárdenas and Alfonso [X], The Complete Libro del Saber de Astrología and Cod. Vat. Lat. 8174, Manuscripta, 375 (1981), Universidad Complutense de Madrid; Emmanuel Poulle, ed. and trans., Les Tables alphonsines avec Les canons de Jean de Saxe (Paris: Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1984); English translation: José Chabás and Bernard R. Goldstein, The Alfonsine Tables of Toledo (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2003).

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11. Abraham bar Hiyya Savasorda and José María Millás Vallicrosa, La obra Sefer Hesbon mahlekot ha-kokabim (Libro del calculo de los movimientos de los astros) ([Barcelona]: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, Instituto Arias Montano, 1959). 12. Portuguese controlled the Canaries from the start of the century until nearly a decade after the death of Prince Henry. Spain had only conquered Lanzarote (1402), Fuerteventura and El Hierro (1405), but La Gomera, Gran Canaria, Tenerife, and La Palma remained in Portuguese hands until 1479/80. For Spanish control of the trans-Mediterranean gold trade, see Steven Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, 958–1528 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 232; Stefan Goodwin, Africa’s Legacies of Urbanization: Unfolding Saga of a Continent (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 96,102. Muslims had controlled the trans-Saharan trade for several centuries. 13. The journey of Hanno of Carthage past the straits of Gibraltar has often been wrongly described as a voyage down the African coast. Unfortunately Hanno describes traveling around multiple erupting volcanoes, which geologists have determined only on the Canaries at the time of his travel. Furthermore, there are only single volcanoes farther along the West African coast, one located in the Cape Verde Islands and another off the coast of Cameroon. For the controversies over the early inhabitants of Amazonas, see William M. Denevan, “Rewriting the Late Pre-European History of Amazonia,” Journal of Latin American Geography 11, no. 1 (2012), 9–24; and Stephen Nugent, “The Amazon on Display: Unknown Amazon: Culture in Nature in Ancient Brazil, British Museum, 16 October–1 April 2002,” Anthropology Today 18, no. 3 (2002), 21–22. 14. “The ebb and flow of the tide respond to the phases of the moon.” Claudio Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, ed. and trans. F. E. Robbins (London: Heinemann, 1940), ch. 2, sec. 13. Isaac Newton’s Principia first identified the gravitational forces of the moon and sun that produce tidal motion in general. Unless otherwise indicated, all scientific definitions used in this article appear in Wolfram’s Mathematica software or its website, scienceworld.mathematica.com. 15. Topography, water depth, shoreline configuration, size of the ocean basin, and other factors have subsequently been determined to influence tidal variations. 16. Abraham Cresques, Atlas Catalane, 1375 BNF, first panel. A Chinese tide table predates Cresques by approximately a century. However, it only fixed tides for a single specific port. 17. I have mapped at least three different tables, including those ably translated by Edward S. Kennedy, and have found both the latitude and longitude placements to be almost entirely wrong, and not in a systematic, but a completely random manner. Edward Stewart Kennedy with Mary Helen Kennedy, Geographical Coordinates of Localities from Islamic Sources (Frankfurt am Main: Institut für Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften, 1987). A statistical study that bends over backward to try to find a pattern in only six of the hundreds of cities has limited success. Mary H. Regier, “Kennedy’s Geographical Tables of Medieval Islam: An Exploratory Statistical Analysis,” in From Deferent to Equant: A Volume of Studies in the History of Science in the Ancient And Medieval Near East in Honor of E.S. Kennedy, ed. Edward S. Kennedy, David A. King, and George Saliba, 357–72 (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1987). 18. Ismā’īl ibn ‘Alī Abū Al-Fidā, Stanislas Guyard, and Joseph Toussaint Reinaud,

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Géographie d’Aboulfeda traduite de l’Arabe . . . ) Reinaud, tom. 1, tom. 2, pt. 1 (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1851). 19. Fifteenth-century astronomers used three nearby planets (Mercury, Venus, and Mars) and the seven brightest stars in the zodiac constellations of Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Leo, Virgo, Scorpio, and Pisces, plus stars from two nonzodiacal constellations, Aquila and Pegasus. These stars are not the brightest in the sky, only the clearest near the moon. Aldebaran (α Tauri) is only 14th brightest, Antares (α Scorpius) 15th brightest, Spica (α Virginis) 16th brightest, and Regulus (α Leonis) only the 29th brightest. In 1336 Levi ben Gerson calculated ecliptic coordinates of these four stars. José Luis Mancha, “Levi Ben Gerson’s Star List for 1336,”Aleph 2, no. 2 (2002), 31–57. 20. One of Zacuto’s technical achievements was a means of calculating lunar longitude for the entire thirty-one-year cycle of the moon’s movements. This detail permitted even more accurate calculations of lunar distances. A portion of Zacuto’s square matrix of nine whole numbers appears in José Chabás and Bernard R. Goldstein, Astronomy in the Iberian Peninsula: Abraham Zacuto and the Transition from Manuscript to Print, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 90 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2000), 113. 21. Gomes Eannes de Zurara and Reis Brasil, Crónica do descobrimento e conquista da Guiné (Mem Martins: Portugal Publicações Europa-América, 1989). Originally published in 1453. The boy’s age was not specified, but he was called a “moço,” a term used only for children sixteen and under. 22. Luís de Albuquerque, As Navegações e a sua Projecção na Ciência e na Cultura (Lisbon: Gradiva, 1987); Albuquerque, A Determinação da Declinação Solar na Náutica dos Descobrimentos (Coimbra: AECA, 1966) (separata 16); also published in Actas do Congresso Internacional de História dos Descobrimentos (Lisbon, 1961), 2:429–50. Although Portugal lost control of the Canary Islands to Spain in 1479/80, the treaty of Alcáçovas excluded Spain from traveling south of the Canaries and guaranteed Portugal a monopoly over southward voyages from those islands. 23. Junta das Missões Geograficas e de Investigaões Coloniais, Atlas de Portugal ultramarino e das grandes viagens portuguesas de descobrimento e expansão (Lisbon, 1948), map 2. 24. J. Spencer Trimingham, “The Arab Geographers and the East African Coast,” in East Africa and the Orient: Cultural Syntheses in Pre-Colonial Times, ed. H. Neville Chittick and Robert I. Rotberg, 115–46 (New York: Africana, 1975), and “Notes on Arabic Sources of Information on East Africa,” in Chittick and Rotberg, East Africa and the Orient, 272–83; Costa Brochado, Historiógrafos dos descobrimentos (Lisbon: Comissão Executiva das Comemoracõȩ s do v Centenário da Morte do Infante D. Henrique, 1960), 51. 25. Abraham ben Samuel Zacuto and Jacob Emden, Sefer Yuh ̣asin ha-shalem (Jerusalem: Yerid ha-sefarim, 2004); Steven Kaplan, A Note on the Hebrew Letters of Prester John (Marlborough: Adam Matthew Digital, 2007); Letter from Afonso de Albuquerque to the King, December 4, 1513, in Academia das Ciências de Lisboa, and José Ramos Coelho, Alguns documentos do Archivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo ácerca das navegações e conquistas portuguezas publicados por ordem do governo de sua majestade fidelissima ao celebrar-se a commemoração quadricentenaria do descobrimento da America (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1892), 329.

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26. According to notations made on a nautical chart of the time, the Pole Star was no longer visible at the Cavalle River (4.367 ° N) BL 35 British Library, Egerton ms73, f. 35 Alvise Cà da Mosto claimed to have lost sight of the polestar at the mouth of the Gambia River 9 degrees farther north (13.467 ° N). Alvise Cà da Mosto and Pedro de Sintra, Viagens de Luís de Cadamosto e de Pedro de Sintra (Lisbon: Academia Portuguesa de História, 1988), 58. While Cà da Mosto’s report can be contested, the map data are definitive. 27. The ecliptic is the celestial path that the sun appears to follow in the course of each year; it is also the plane of the earth’s orbit around the sun. 28. A sidereal day occurs when the sun returns to its same position in the sky relative to the background of stars. The mean sidereal day is 23.93 hours or approximately 4 minutes shorter than the mean solar day. A solar day occurs when the sun reaches its highest point above the horizon (local noon), a position that changes daily. 29. In addition they had to decide which measure of a year to use—the sidereal or the tropical year—which model of precession to use, and which model of both was more accurate. 30. Georg Peurbach (1423–61) and Johan Regiomontanus (1436–76) were among the few Christians in this field. For a survey of all late medieval European scientists, see José Chabás and Bernard R. Goldstein, A Survey of European Astronomical Tables in the Late Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2012). 31. Zacuto composed the work in Hebrew in 1473 and another Jewish astronomer, José Vizinho, translated it into Latin “traductori [sic] Joseph cognome~to vicino.” Abraham ben Samuel Zacuto, Almanach perpetuu[m] exactissime nuper eme[n]datu[m] omniu[m] celi motuum: cum additionib[us] in eo factis tenens complementum (Venice: Petru[m] Liechtenstein, 1502), 3. The almanach tables had to take into account the length of the sidereal year, precession, and the length of the solar year. Zacuto, born in Salamanca, Spain, in 1452, was thus in his twenties when he compiled these tables. 32. Al-Zarqeli (1029–87 CE) had proposed a universal method of using the astrolabe but his solution employed circles too closely inscribed to be easily read. For a surviving example of ‘Ibn al-Saffar’s astrolabe, see L. A. Mayer, Islamic Astrolabists and Their Works (Geneva: Albert Kundig,1956), 75. 33. An early sixteenth–century description of how the Portuguese used this instrument is in the letter of Alessandro Zorzi, reproduced in Luís de Albuquerque, Max J. Guedes, and Gerald Lombardi, eds., Portugal-Brazil: The Age of Atlantic Discoveries (Lisbon: Bertand Editora, 1990), 56–57. An early drawing illustrating how to use this astrolabe appears in the Jewish (converso) cosmographer Pedro Nunes, Tratado da sphera (Lisbon, 1537). 34. For an argument for the importance of transferred and transformed scientific knowledge, see Patrick Manning, Navigating World History: Historials Create a Global Past (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 96–97 and Manning, “Introduction,” in Global Scientific Practice in an Age of Revolutions, 1750–1850, ed. Patrick Manning and Daniel Rood (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), 5. 35. Although contemporary Portuguese usage refers to it as the nautical astrolabe (and English sometimes employs “mariners’ astrolabe,” at the time it was simply known as “the astrolabe,” because no other device was as ubiquitous.

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36. Joaquim Bensaúde, Regimento do astrolabio e do quadrante: tractado da spera do mundo (Lisbon: Imprimerie Nationale, 1924); Luís de Albuquerque and Joannes de Sacro Bosco, Os guias náuticos de Munique e Évora (Lisbon: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1965). 37. Joaquim Bensaúde, L’astronomie nautique au Portugal à l’époque des grandes découvertes (Bern: Drechsel, 1912), 111. David Waters, “The Sea or Mariner’s Astrolabe,” Revista da Faculdade de Ciencias (Coimbra) 39, 5–36. 38. Bensaúde, L’astronomie nautique, 40, 79. João de Barros, Ásia de Joam de Barros, dos fectos que os Portugueses fizeram no descobrimento et conquista dos mares et terras do Oriente (Lisbon: Germão Galharde, 1552), Década 1, livro 3, capítulo 2 describes it as “3 palmos” in diameter but does not mention that Zacuto was its creator. Modern equivalents of these dimensions are from Roger C. Smith, Vanguard of Empire: Ships of Exploration in the Age of Columbus (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 56. Fourteenth-century astrolabes were usually more than double this size, 7 palmos: King Pedro IV of Aragon and José M. Millás Vallicrosa, Las Tablas Astronómicas del Rey Don Pedro el Ceremonioso (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto Arias Montano y Associación para la Historia de la Ciencia Española, 1962), 67–69. The description by Luís de Camões of the “new astrolabe,” identifying it as a “sage and wise invention,” by a Jewish man is thought to refer to Zacuto. Luís de Camões, Os Luisadas (Lisbon, 1584) canto V, stanza 25. 39. Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), ch. 4. 40. “Defining latitude is much simpler [than longitude], for the altitude of the sun above the horizon is the crucial fact. . . . The astronomical tables in medieval nautical manuals were already so accurate that a person who had properly determined the declination of the sun could fix his latitude to within half a degree or less.” Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers (New York: Random House, 1983), 48. 41. Hacking’s comment refers to a line in Shakespeare’s Richard III. Classic examples of this tradition include Robert K. Merton, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England (New York: Howard Fertig, 1970); Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800 (New York: Macmillan, 1957). But many more recent and sophisticated histories such as Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) are oriented toward the English experience. 42. For a survey of surviving maritime astrolabes, see Alan Stimson, The Mariner’s Astrolabe: A Survey of Known, Surviving Sea Astrolabes (Utrecht: Hes, 1988); The historiography of the topic is ably covered by David Waters, “Sea or Mariner’s Astrolabe,” n51. For another view of astrolabes arguing for the superiority of land-based and more general astrolabes, see David A. King, “What Is an Astrolabe, & What Is an Astrolabe Not?” 2018, accessed February 10, 2018, https://davidaking.academia.edu/research. 43. Leyla Perrone-Moisés, Vinte luas: viagem de Paulmier de Gonneville ao Brasil, 1503–1505 (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras 1992); Ernesto Milano and Alberto Cantino, La carta del Cantino. Examples of such borrowings include Martin Waldseemüller’s maps and those acquired by the Duc d’ Este for his library. Martin Waldseemüller,

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Cosmographiae Introdvctio Cvm . . . Vrbs Deodate [Saint-Dié, Lorraine]: Walther Lud, 1507; Martin Waldseemüller, John W Hessler, and Library of Congress, The Naming of America: Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 World Map and the Cosmographiae Introductio (London: Giles, 2008). 44. Cook’s achievements in fixing longitude proved his unusually keen observational skills, which he had employed continuously while crossing the Pacific. 45. D. João de Castro, Obras Completas de D. João de Castro, ed. Armando Cortesão and Luis de Albuquerque (Coimbra: Academia Internacional da Cultura Portuguesa, 1968–76), 1:177–78, 286–89; Ramon Abadal y Vinyals, Pedro el Ceremonioso y los comienzos de la decadencia política de Cataluña (Madrid: Espasa–Calpe, 1966).

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CONTRIBUTORS

Robert Batchelor (PhD UCLA) is a professor of history and director of Digital Humanities at Georgia Southern University. He is the author of London: The Selden Map and the Making of a Global City, 1549–1689 (Chicago, 2014) as well as numerous articles and digital humanities projects. He is the discoverer of the Selden Map of China (Bodleian Library), which he has used to create the board game Fujian Trader with Sari Gilbert. His current project is a book on the early modern Pacific. BuYun Chen is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Swarthmore College. She is broadly interested in the history of women’s work, labor, and craft technology. Her current project investigates the history of bingata, a technique of printing colorful and intricate patterns on fabric that originated in the Ryūkyū Kingdom (modern-day Okinawa), the center of a vibrant web of tributary and trading networks linking China, Japan, Southeast Asia, and, after 1600, Europe. Francesca Fiaschetti (PhD LMU Munich University 2015) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She specialized in Sinology and Mongolian Studies and has published various articles on diplomacy in East Asia under Mongol rule, the 421

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CONTRIBUTORS

political ideology of the Yuan dynasty, and representations of identity and ethnicity in East Asia. Among others, she has coedited the volume Political Strategies of Identity Building in non-Han Empires in China (Harrassowitz, 2014) and is currently working on her first monograph entitled “Limits of Belonging: The Concept of Foreign Land in Yuan China.” Margaret Gaida received her PhD in the History of Science from the University of Oklahoma. Her research focuses on the transmission and circulation of knowledge in the medieval Mediterranean, particularly astronomy, astrology, and optics. She is a recipient of the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, and the Mediterranean Regional Research Fellowship from the Council of American Overseas Research Centers. She is currently a lecturer in the Expository Writing Program at the University of Oklahoma. Bernard R. Goldstein, University Professor, Emeritus, at the University of Pittsburgh, has written extensively on the history of astronomy from antiquity to early modern times. Among his recent publications with José Chabás are Essays on Medieval Computational Astronomy (Leiden: Brill, 2015). He has also published “Levi ben Gerson on the Sources of Error in Astronomy,” Aleph 10 (2010), 211–40. In collaboration with Giora Hon he has published a series of articles, including “J. J. Thomson’s Plum-Pudding Atomic Model: The Making of a Scientific Myth,” Annalen der Physik 525, no. 8–9 (2013), A129–A133. Giora Hon is a professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Haifa, Israel. He has published widely on the problem of error in philosophy and in science, especially in connection with the methodology of experimentation. In 2009 he collaborated with Jutta Schickore and Friedrich Steinle in editing the volume Going Amiss in Experimental Research (Dordrecht: Springer). Together with Bernard R. Goldstein, in 2008 he published a comprehensive study, From Summetria to Symmetry: The Making of a Revolutionary Scientific Concept (Dordrecht: Springer). M. A. Mujeeb Khan is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tokyo. His research focuses on the history of medical literary traditions and intercultural communication during the medieval period with a particular emphasis on the Islamic world, China, and Japan. His publications include studies of Tanba no Yasuyori (d. 995), Abū Bakr al-Rāzī (d. 925/932), and

CONTRIBUTORS

423

Ibn Sīnā (d. 1037). He is also interested in contemporary imaginations of “the other” and premodern cultures. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. Prior to this, he earned an MS in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Tokyo and an MA in Regional Studies–East Asia from Harvard University. Katrin Kogman-Appel is a professor of Jewish studies at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster. She has published work on the relationship between Jewish and Christian visual cultures and on Hebrew manuscript painting. She is the author of Jewish Book Art between Islam and Christianity” (Brill, 2004), and Illuminated Haggadot from Medieval Spain (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), which won the Premio del Rey Prize of the American Historical Association in 2009. She also contributed to a facsimile edition of the Washington Haggadah for Harvard University Press. A Mahzor from Worms: Art and Religion in a Medieval Jewish Community, a monograph on the Leipzig Mahzor (Harvard University Press, 2012) was a finalist of the National Jewish Book Award (scholarship). Huei-Ying Kuo (BA, MA, National Taiwan University; PhD State University of New York-Binghamton) is currently a senior lecturer and associate research scientist in the Department of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. She received the Social Science Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship for Transregional Research in the 2012–13 academic year, and a short-term visiting fellowship of the Asian Research Institute of National University of Singapore in 2014. Her most recent award is the William Dearborn Fellowship in American History at Houghton Library, Harvard University (2016). She is the author of Networks beyond Empires: Chinese Business and Nationalism in the Hong Kong-Singapore Corridor, 1914–1941 (Brill, 2014), among other journal articles and book chapters on the Chinese diaspora. Patrick Manning is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of World History, Emeritus, at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the coeditor of Global Scientific Practice in an Age of Revolutions (2016) and Global Transformations in the Life Sciences, 1945–1980 (2018), and is the author of Big Data in History (2013), The African Diaspora: A History through Culture (2009), and Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (2003). He was founding director of the World History Center (2008 to 2015) and served as president of the American Historical Association in 2016.

424

CONTRIBUTORS

Ruth Mostern is an associate professor of history and director of the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Prior to that she was a member of the founding faculty at the University of California, Merced, and director of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Graduate Group there. A specialist in Chinese and world spatial and environmental history, she is the author of Dividing the Realm in Order to Govern: The Spatial Organization of the Song State (960–1276 CE) (Harvard University Press, 2011) and coeditor of Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana University Press, 2016). Rila Mukherjee has been a professor of history at the University of Hyderabad since 2007. Before that she was an associate professor at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. Her interest lies in maritime networks and human–nature interactions in the extended Indian Ocean. She is currently working on medieval cashless economies in the northern Bay of Bengal and the representation of the Bengal delta in historical time. She is also the editor of Asian Review of World Histories, the official publication of the Asian Association of World Historians. Abigail Owen is a member of the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University. Her current projects both stem from her Columbia University dissertation, “Hidden Waters: Groundwater Histories of Iran and the Mediterranean.” The first is a multiauthor edited translation and commentary on al-Karaji’s eleventh-century Arabic text, “Treatise on the Extraction of Hidden Waters.” The second project is a revision of the dissertation and its arguments, focusing on the perception of expert cultures of groundwater management, and implications for international development projects that focus on water and development. Karen Pinto is an associate research professor in the College of Innovation and Design at Boise State University. She specializes in the history of Islamic cartography and its intersections between Ottoman, European, and other world cartographic traditions. Born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan, educated at Dartmouth and Columbia, Karen Pinto is into premodern maps of all kinds and sizes in a big way. She has a two-thousand-strong image repository of maps—many that have never been published before. Her book Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration was published digitally by the University of Chicago Press in July 2016 and in hardcover in November 2016.

CONTRIBUTORS

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Irina Podgorny is permanent research scholar (Investigadora Principal) at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) and director of the Historical Archive of La Plata Museum, Argentina. Her research interests include history of science and medicine, natural history museums, quackery, and history of archaeological and paleontological collections, fields in which she has published extensively in both Spanish and English. Recently, she has coedited with Phil Kohl and Stefanie Gänger, Nature and Antiquities: The Making of Archaeology in the Americas  (University of Arizona Press, 2014) and published “Los Pichiciegos: Scraps of Information and the Affinities of Mammals in the Nineteenth Century,” in Global Scientific Practice in an Age of Revolutions, edited by Patrick Manning and Daniel Rood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016). With Maria Margaret Lopes she coedited a special issue of Museum History Journal 9, no.1 (2016) devoted to the history of Latin American museums. Roxann Prazniak is a professor of history at Robert D. Clark Honors College, University of Oregon. Her areas of specialization are Chinese and Eurasian histories. She is the author of Dialogues across Civilizations: Sketches in World History from the Chinese and European Experiences (1996) and Of Camel Kings and Other Things: Rural Rebels Against Modernity in Late Imperial China (1999). She has published numerous articles including “Ilkhanid Buddhism: Traces of a Passage in Eurasian History,” Comparative Studies in Society and History (2014), and “Artistic Exchange and the Mongol Empire” for the forthcoming Cambridge History of the Mongol Empire (2019). Her most recent book is Sudden Appearances: The Mongol Turn in Commerce, Belief, and Art (University of Hawai’i Press, 2018). Pat Seed is a professor of history at the University of California–Irvine. She specializes in the history of cartography and navigation worldwide. She is author of The Oxford Map Companion: One Hundred Sources in World History (2014). Her American Pentimento: The Invention of Indians and the Pursuit of Riches (2001) won the American Historical Association’s James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic History. She is also the author of Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (1995); and To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico: Conflicts over Marriage Choice, 1574–1821 (1992). Nükhet Varlık is an associate professor of history at Rutgers University– Newark. She is a historian of the Ottoman Empire interested in disease,

426

CONTRIBUTORS

medicine, and public health. She is the author of the multiple award-winning Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347–1600 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and the editor of Plague and Contagion in the Islamic Mediterranean (Arc Humanities Press, 2017). She is currently working on two book projects: “The Ottoman Healing Arts: Healers, Patients, and the State in the Early Modern Era” and “Empire, Ecology, and Plague: Rethinking the Second Pandemic (ca.1340s–ca.1840s).” Dror Weil received a PhD degree from Princeton University’s Department of East Asian Studies in 2016 with a dissertation titled “The Vicissitudes of Late Imperial China’s Accommodation of Arabo-Persian Knowledge on the Natural World, 16th–18th Centuries,” under the guidance of Benjamin Elman and Michael Cook. Currently, he is a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. His research interests include the intellectual history and the study of translation and foreign texts in late imperial China, and the circulation of Islamic astronomical and medical knowledge in China.

INDEX

‘Abbasid caliphate, 47, 78–79, 100, 107, 201, 272 ‘Abdallāh, 48, 269, 272 Abbreviation to the Introduction of Astrology (Albumasar), 247, 249 Abdur Razzaq, 80, 90 Abū Bakr al-Rāzī, 192–98, 201–5, 339 Aceh, 81, 83, 90 Aden, 80–81, 87, 89 Aegean Sea, 106, 188 Africa, 4, 15, 52, 60–62, 64, 66, 71–72, 110, 156–57, 282–84, 289, 360; East, 80, 86, 156, 283; North, 43, 48, 51, 53, 115, 177, 278, 281; South, 66, 282–83, 286; western, 278, 282–84, 287 African oryx, 155 al-Andalus, 30, 43, 53, 157

al-Baghdādī, Ibn ‘Abd al-Laṭif, 194, 197 al-Battānī, 212, 213, 216, 220, 225 al-Farghani, Ahmad Ibn Muhammad ibn Kathir, 30, 35–36, 38, 213, 298 al-Idrisi, Muhammad, 31, 33, 57, 86, 299 al-Kitāb al-ḥāwī fī al-ṭibb (Abū Bakr al-Rāzī), 192–94, 196–97, 204 al-Kitāb al-manṣūrī fi al-ṭibb (Abū Bakr al-Rāzī), 194–96 al-Mahrī, Sulaymān ibn Ahmad, 80–81, 83 al-Majūsī, 194–97, 202, 342 al-Qazwini, 84, 86, 315 al-Tūsī, Nasir al-Din, 228–32, 234–36, 240–43

427

428

INDEX

‘alāma, 48, 305 Albertus Magnus, 68, 249, 256, 351 Albumasar, 247–51, 255, 351, 353 Alcabitius, 14, 244–45, 247–51, 255–61, 349 alcochoden, 252–53, 353 Alfonso X, 36, 238–39, 277–78 Alkindi, 249, 251 Allsen, Thomas, 165–66, 168 Almagest, 29–31, 34–38, 209–12, 216–17, 267, 302 almanac, 232, 234–235, 265, 267, 269, 272, 291 Americas, 4, 149, 152, 156–57, 161–62, 294 Anatoli, Jacob, 35, 51, 55 Andalusi, 41, 44, 46, 48, 197, 214, 238–39, 252, 304 Annam, 105, 107 anta, 149, 157–58, 161–62 antelope, 153, 157 antiepileptic, 150, 153 apothecary, 155–56 Apulia, 49, 56 Arabian Sea, 60, 62 Arabo-Persian astronomy, 263–74 Arabo-Persian calendar, 271–74 Aries, 235, 282, 361 Asia Minor, 63, 112 Asia, 19–20, 34, 52, 59–63, 65, 71, 100, 109, 264, 268, 274; central, 58, 230; east, 29, 34, 76, 87, 89, 143, 164–65, 176, 178, 239, 273; south, 9, 60, 62, 70, 178, 279, 283; southeast, 12, 80, 83, 86, 89–90, 104, 120–22, 239; west, 60, 177, 265 astrolabe, 15, 83, 247, 285–89, 291, 352, 362

astrology, 4, 14, 32, 37–38, 49, 165, 167, 186, 230–32, 234–35, 237, 242, 244–45, 247–61, 266–67, 271 Atlantic Ocean, 4, 31, 53, 80, 152, 156, 275–76, 278–90 Atlas Universal (Dourado), 66, 68 atlas, 41–42, 47–48, 59, 65–66, 68, 73, 81–82, 94 Averroës, 214, 245

Babylon, 238, 280 Bacci, Andrea, 155, 158 Bacon, Roger, 213, 236–37, 240–41, 301 Baghdad, 78, 100, 232–33, 277 banana, 87, 89, 122–23, 132, 321 Barcelona, 31, 236, 239 Baumann, Brian, 168–69 Bay of Bengal, 64–65, 73, 86, 108–9 bencao, 200 Bengal, 64–68, 71, 124; delta, 58, 60, 64 bingata, 12, 117, 119–21, 123–26, 128–33 bird-and-flower art, 121, 126, 128–29 Black Death, 177–78, 180–83, 189 Black Sea, 19–20, 62 Blaeu, Joan, 65, 71 BNE Ar. T-O map, 42–43, 45–46, 48, 57 Bologna, 244, 251, 257 Book of Curiosities, 31–33, 57, 307 Book of Genesis, 61–62 Borneo, 83, 102, 105, 107 Brahmaputra River, 60, 65–66, 68, 70–71 Buddha, 77; Buddhism, 61–62, 77–78, 97, 108, 169, 200, 232

INDEX

Bureau of Astronomy, 174, 266, 268 Byzantine Empire, 37, 49, 63, 75, 230, 232–35, 237

Cairo, 80, 185, 187, 281 caliph, 32, 47, 55, 76, 78, 100, 107, 277, 307; Abbasid, 47, 78, 100, 107 Canary Islands, 20, 276, 278–82, 289, 360–61 Canton, 65, 90, 100 Cardano, Girolamo, 247–48, 261 cartography, 4, 11–12, 19–20, 29–33, 37–38, 41–43, 47–48, 57–59, 63, 66, 70–74, 80, 83, 146, 265, 278, 281, 289–90; Islamic, 29, 32, 47, 57; Islamo-Christian, 41–42, 48, 302 Castilian, 36, 238, 245, 277 celestial spheres, 78, 213–14, 219, 221, 228, 241; navigation, 14, 79, 276–77, 287, 290 Centiloquium (Ptolemy), 258–59 ceramic, 122–23, 129 Ceylon, 9, 79, 82 Champa, 61, 100 Chau Ju-Kua (Zhao Rugua), 93–98, 101–3, 107–8, 110 Chinese nationalism, 95, 109 Chronicle of Ryūkyū, 122, 125–26 chrysanthemums, 124–25 cinnabar, 125–26 clock, 282, 291, 295 Cochinchina, 61, 100, 106 coconut (palm), 87, 89 colophon, 20, 42–44, 48–51, 56–57 Constantinople, 94, 227–28, 234–35, 239, 306 Copernicus, 216, 219–23, 239,

429

241–43; Copernican system, 219, 221–24 Coronelli, 68, 71 Cosmographia, 59, 68, 216 cosmology, 14, 20, 78–79, 84, 224–25 cosmos, 172, 224–25, 232 cotzar, 38, 302 Cresques, Abraham, 11, 19–20, 29, 31, 35, 37–38, 79, 280 Cresques, Elisha ben Abraham. See Cresques, Abraham Crete, 46, 52–53 Cyprus, 46, 52–53, 239

da Gama, Vasco, 62, 81, 287, 289–90 Dadu, 234–35, 237 Damascus, 187, 197, 228, 232 damask, 122, 126 danta, 156–57 Dante, 63, 247 dao, 134–35 Dashi (Ta-shi), 96–98, 100, 107–8 de Armas, Juan Ignacio, 150, 157 De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (Copernicus), 221, 241 Department of Arabo-Persian Calendar, 271–74 Dioscorides, 154–55 Directorate of Arabo-Persian Astronomy, 265, 269–71 Directorate of Astronomy, 269–70, 272, 274 disease hosts, 179–80 disease vectors, 179–80 divination, 4, 13, 15, 136, 164–76, 334 Djabulsa, 101, 116 dunjia, 170, 172, 174

430

INDEX

Earth, 4, 11, 14, 29 34–35, 66, 72, 78, 97, 174, 186, 209–16, 219–23, 225, 279–80, 284–85, 290, 346, 364; shape, 31–32, 47 eclipse, 210–11, 225, 232, 280 Ecuador, 150, 161 ecumene, 19–20, 29–35, 38–40, 60 Egypt, 7, 32, 48, 60–61, 80–81, 98, 100, 187, 189, 236–37 elephant, 97, 157, 162, 164 elk, 149, 152–63 Emanuel I, 289–90 Emir Çelebi, 188–89 encyclopedia, 13–14, 59, 192–94, 197–205, 341 encyclopedism, 192, 196–201, 203–5 epicycle, 219, 228, 230 epilepsy, 13, 149, 152–58, 161, 163 equator, 31, 34, 278, 283–84, 287, 290 Ethiopia, 60–61, 64, 66 Etymologiae (Isidore), 42–43, 46 Euclid, 228, 232, 266, 356 Euphrates, 60, 62 Eurasia, 1, 4, 15, 78, 100, 106, 164–67, 176–77, 227, 230, 237, 240, 242–43 Eurocentricism, 7–9, 74, 245, 295

Farhi bible, 19–20 Félix de Azara, 149, 158 Feng Chenjun, 106–8, 319 Florence, 6, 75, 242, 251, 258–59 folio, 42–45, 213, 257–58, 267 folk crafts, 12, 118, 120 Fra Mauro, 64–65, 73 François Jullien, 134–35

Frederick II, 41, 49, 51, 55, 57, 306–7 Fujian province, 80, 87, 90, 95, 102, 106, 117, 121–26 Fuzhou. See Quanzhou

Galen, 155, 160, 194, 197, 202–3 Ganges River, 12, 60–68, 70, 72, 146 Garden of Eden, 62–63 Gastaldi, Giacomo, 59, 67, 70 Geminos, 34–35, 38 geocentric system, 209–10, 219 Geographia (Ptolemy), 29–35, 58–59, 63, 71 geography, 20, 31, 35, 44, 46, 57, 63–64, 68, 71, 73, 77, 79, 85, 96, 139, 165, 175, 188 geometric models, 210–11 geometry, 73, 76, 78, 266 Ghazan, Ilkhan, 231–32, 239 gold, 48, 61–62, 68, 85, 122, 124–26, 133, 159, 164, 278, 283 gran bestia, 149–50, 152, 154–56, 161–62 Grand Canal, 141–43, 145 Greece, 2, 75, 242; Greek, language, 3, 8, 60, 63, 72, 75, 106, 162, 210, 224, 230, 235–36, 244, 278, 283; science, 34, 232, 245, 251–52, 263, 272, 280; manuscripts, 63, 246; authors, 250–51 Guangdon, 102, 106 Guenga, 65, 68 Gujarat, 81, 89, 115 Gumilla, José, 150, 161 Guo Shoujing, 235, 237, 267 Guomindang (GMD), 103–4

INDEX

Hall, Basil, 132–33 Han dynasty, 2, 78, 105–7 Hanlin Academy, 251, 357 harmonics, 53, 64 Hebei, 137, 145 Hebrew, 3, 8, 29, 34–38, 213–14, 245, 277, 289; manuscripts, 11, 14, 19, 36–37 Heian period, 125, 198, 200 heliocentric system, 209, 216, 219–21, 242–43 Herodotus, 60, 64 Himalayas, 68, 72, 146 Hirth-Rockhill thesis, 107–9 Hirth, Friedrich, 93–95, 98, 100–103, 105–9, 114–16, 316 history of science, 1–2, 4–7, 10–11, 15, 241–42, 289, 295 hō-ō birds, 126, 131 Hohenstaufen, 35, 49–51 Hongwu, 121, 124, 263, 255 Hongze Lake, 137, 141–42 Hormuz, 80, 82, 115 hua, 96–98, 108 Huai River, 137, 140–45 huihui, 170, 237, 265, 267, 269, 271–72 Hülegü Khan, 169, 171, 173, 228, 232–33, 238, 241, 265 hydrocrats, 136–37, 141, 143, 146, 323 hydrography, 20, 30, 68, 72 hydrology, 58, 72, 137–39, 141, 143–45 hyleg, 252–53, 257, 353

Iberia, 11, 20, 29–31, 34, 36–37, 42–43, 184, 276–77, 281, 285, 290–91 Iberian Peninsula, 36, 43, 233, 238, 276

431

Ibn al-Haytham, Al-Hasan, of Basra, 30, 35–36, 38, 343, 356 Ibn al-Nafīs, 197 Ibn al-Saffar, Muhammad, 285, 362 Ibn Battuta, 66, 87 Ibn Ezra, Abraham, 31, 37, 301 Ibn Hawqal, Muhammad, 32, 47, 299 Ibn Mājid, Ahmad, 73, 80–81 Ibn Sīnā, 189, 194, 198, 201–2 Iha Fuyū, 124, 322 Ilkhanate, 84, 86, 169, 171, 227–28, 230–33, 236–40, 264 ‘ilm, 80–81 Ilyas bin Ibrahim (Eliahu ben Avraham), 184, 186, 242 Imaus Mons, 64–65, 68 India, 20, 31, 34, 60–66, 68, 71–72, 87, 98, 115, 120, 287, 289; India Extra Gangem, 61–62, 65, 68; science in, 232, 251–52, 265 Indian Ocean, 12, 14, 52–53, 58–59, 64, 66, 71, 73, 79–83, 86–87, 89–90, 98, 100, 106–9, 279, 283–84 Indus, 58, 60–62, 64–66, 68, 70, 100 institutionalization, 13, 166–67, 174 interpreters, 61, 238, 266 Introduction to Astrology (Alcabitius), 14, 244, 247–50, 253, 256–60 Introduction to the Phenomena (Geminos), 34–35, 38 Iran, 48, 83, 85, 115, 212, 228, 240 Iryakushō (Masatada), 199–201, 203 Isfahan, 83, 85–86, 115 Ishinpō (Yasuyori), 192–93, 198–204, 341–42 Isidore, 42–43, 45–46, 57, 63

432

INDEX

Islam, 49, 86, 100, 181, 184, 248, 255, 263–64, 281; medical tradition, 188, 193, 197–98, 201, 203, 263; Islamic world, 29–30, 34, 42, 46, 181–82, 192–94, 197, 201–2, 204–5, 211–12, 237, 245, 251–52, 337; medieval, 29, 41, 46, 53, 55, 57, 263 Islamic Golden Age, 246, 276 Islamic realm, 19, 34 Islamicate, 262–65, 270, 273–74 Islamo-christian cartography, 41–42, 48, 302 Istanbul, 81, 184–87, 189–90, 237 Italy, 34, 36–37, 50, 61, 65, 74, 154, 159, 245, 301 iudicium, 251, 257 ivory, 122, 153, 164

Jamāl al-Dīn Muhammad b. Tāhir b. Muhammad al-Zaydi al-Bukharī (Jamal al Din), 174, 265, 355 Japan, 13–14, 89–90, 96, 119–20, 122, 129, 131–32, 192–94, 198, 200–205, 296, 318, 321 Japanese, 3, 102, 104, 109, 119–20, 122, 192, 321, 339, 341–42; art, 118, 124–25, 129; intellectuals, 12, 198; medical tradition, 194, 199–205, 338–39 Java, 8, 82, 86, 100, 105–6, 114, 120, 122 Jesuit, 150, 156, 274 Jew, 14, 36–38, 184, 193, 224, 233, 275–78, 281, 284, 289; Jewish scientists, 31, 276, 278–85, 289–90

Jiaozhi, 96, 100 Jin Dejin, 170, 172–74 Jinan University, 104–5 Johannes de Fundis, 251, 257–58 Johannes Hispalensis, 249–50 Josephus, 60, 62 Jupiter, 210, 212, 219–20, 222, 255 Jurchen, 95, 136, 139, 170 jurists, 84, 185

Kaempfer, Engelbert, 85–86 Kaifeng, 95, 137 Kanen yōshō (Yukinaga), 199–200 karakami, 125–26 Kepler, Johannes, 209, 214, 222–26, 242–43 Khurasan, 48, 233 Ki-shï, 100, 115 Ki-tz’i-ini, 100, 115 King Henry VI, 50 Kitāb al-dhakhīra fī ‘ilm al-ṭibb, 194–95 Kitāb al-masālik wa-al-mamālik (KMMS), 41–42, 46–48, 50–53, 55–57, 303, 307 Kitab suwar al-kawakib al-thabita (al-Sufi), 233, 238, 356 Korea, 79, 96, 105, 237, 273–74 Koremune Tomotoshi, 194, 200 Kumejima, 123, 320, 322 Kuniyoshi, 122–23 Kūshyār ibn Labbān, 212, 271, 357

lacquer, 122–23, 126, 321 Lake Chiamay, 68, 70 Lanwuli, 96–97, 100 Laos, 61, 65, 72, 114

INDEX

latitude, 15, 31, 71–72, 257, 271, 280–81, 283–85, 287, 289–91, 346, 360, 363 Leiden KMMS manuscript, 50–53, 56–57 Leiden Libraries, 42, 49–50 Leiden, 49–50, 53 Leo, 282, 361 Levi ben Gerson of Orange (Gersonides), 213–14, 224, 285, 361 Li Changfu, 105–6, 108 Li Chui, 138–39 Li Dingyuan, 117–18, 120, 129, 132–33 Li Shizhen, 135–36 Liang Qichao, 95, 102, 105, 108 Libya, 34, 60, 300 Lidai bao’an, 122–23 Linnaeus, 152, 156 Lisbon, 278–79, 282–83, 286 Lithuania, 158, 160 Liu Bingzhong, 172, 174 longitude, 15, 31, 71–72, 258, 271, 280–82, 289–91, 360–61, 363–64 Lucera, 51, 56 lunar distance astronomy, 282–83, 290–91, 361

Ma-sha-yi-hei, 270–71 Macedonia, 46, 68 Magellan, Ferdinand 289–90 Maghreb, 43, 48, 51, 53, 55, 116 Magini-Porro maps, 66–67 Mahgreb, 43, 48, 51, 53, 55, 116, 307, 314 Majannah al-ta’un wa al-waba’ (Ilyas bin Ibrahim), 184 Majorca, 19–20, 37, 39

433

Malacca, 81, 103, 108, 121–22 Malay Peninsula, 83, 102, 114 Malaya, 105, 156 Maldives, 82, 89 Mallorca, 37, 278, 280 Mandate of Heaven, 264, 269 Manila, 89, 121 Manzi, 61, 228 mapmaking, 29–30, 32, 36, 58, 63–64, 68, 71, 86, 275, 297 mappamundi, 11, 19–20, 34, 38–40, 43, 61, 63, 297 Marāgha Observatory, 227–28, 230–31, 236, 238, 240–41, 265, 355 Marco Polo, 61, 79, 103, 170 Marignolli, 61, 63–64 Marinus of Tyre, 63, 66 maritime trade, 81, 89, 94–95, 98, 121 Mars, 210, 213, 219–20, 222, 282, 361 materia medica, 4, 135, 155, 200 mathematics, 64, 76, 80, 90, 165, 168, 242, 247, 257, 266, 277, 284–85 mborebi, 149, 157 Mecca, 80, 83, 100, 236, 276 medicine, 4, 122, 149, 152–53, 155, 161–62, 165, 168, 170, 184, 188, 191, 194–200, 202–3, 228, 231, 247, 264, 266–67, 276; medical knowledge, 192–94, 196, 202–3; medical literature, 13, 192–94, 197–205, 339, 342 Mediterranean, 11, 42, 46, 48, 51–56, 61, 72–73, 81, 115, 177, 181–82, 189, 239, 243, 246, 278–79, 283; basin, 19–20; map, 53, 72, 303 Meghna, 60, 66 Meiji Japan, 12, 119

434

INDEX

Mekong, 61, 64, 70–71 Mercator, Gerard, 59, 65, 71 Mercury, 161, 210–11, 214–15, 219, 221–22, 282, 361 Middle Ages, 29, 32, 34, 157, 212, 221, 224, 245, 283, 343 Ming China, 83, 90, 122, 139, 262–63, 268, 270, 273; Ming court, 123, 269–70, 272, 274 Ming-Qing China, 121, 129, 132, 321 mingei, 118, 120 Minnan, 3, 87 Möngke Khan, 228, 265, 355 Mongol Empire, 9, 164–67, 170–72, 175–76, 227, 232, 236, 240–41, 243, 262–64, 268; courts, 13, 166, 170, 264; Eurasia, 165–66; Ilkhanate, 84 Mongolia, 94, 167, 169, 175, 236, 238, 356 Mongols, 79, 100, 165–72, 175, 231, 233, 236, 239–40, 264, 330 monsoon, 96, 100, 145 moon, 4, 14–15, 64, 70, 209–12, 216, 222, 228, 234–35, 278–79, 281–82, 291, 360–61 moose, 149, 152–53, 156–57 Mosconi, Lleó Judah, 37–38 Mountains of the Moon, 64, 70 Mughal, 9, 80, 86, 89 Muhammad (Ma-ha-ma), 236, 271 Muhyi al-Din al-Maghribi, 228, 236, 242 Mulanpi, 97, 107 multilingualism, 3, 8, 36, 79, 238, 266, 294 Muscat, 80, 100

Muscovy, 157, 160, 329 Muslim geography, 41, 46, 57, 281

Nanjing, 95, 101, 104–6, 108–9, 122, 268–69, 273 ncocco, 156, 158 Needham, Joseph 12, 76, 79, 90, 169 nesting hypothesis, 14, 209–13, 215–16, 219, 221–22, 224–26 Nestorian, 265–66 New World, 152, 162, 164, 275 nîgashî bashôfu, 123, 321 Nile, 31, 53, 60–62, 64, 66, 70, 72 Norman rule, 41–42, 48–52, 55–57, 256, 305 North America, 149, 157 numeracy, 76, 79, 90

Ögödei, 167, 172 Okinawa, 117, 119–20, 124, 133, 320 Old World, 52, 149, 152, 154, 157 Oman, 100, 115 Ōmitake Hyōbu, 122, 321 Orientalism, 8, 109, 245 Ortelius, 59, 65, 68 Ottoman, 3, 12–13, 51, 80–83, 85–87, 89, 179–90, 205, 242, 306, 337

P’u-hua-lo (Bokhara), 100, 115 Pacific Ocean, 4, 53, 83, 86–87, 90, 279, 283, 290 Palermo, 49, 55 Pan Jixun, 141–42, 144 Paradise, 62–64, 68, 72 parallax, 210, 212, 214, 221, 346

INDEX

Paris, 19, 38–39, 159, 236, 244, 255, 257, 354 Pegu, 65, 71 Pennant, Thomas, 149, 152 Persia, 13–14, 30, 62, 86, 98 Persian Gulf, 48, 52, 62, 86, 98, 100, 108, 115 pharmaceuticals, 13, 153, 185, 188 Philippines, 89, 102, 105 Phison river, 62, 64 physician, 37, 49, 153–55, 163–64, 168, 182–84, 188–89, 197–98, 200–201, 247, 258, 278 physics, 9, 64, 154, 214, 226, 231, 266, 347 Pingzhou ketan (Zu Yu), 79, 102 plague, 11, 13, 79, 177–89, 253 Planetary Hypotheses (Ptolemy), 14, 209–11, 213–14 polestar, 284, 362 Portolan chart, 19–20, 29–30, 39, 43, 59, 66, 71, 73, 79, 81–82, 313–14 Portugal, 14, 154, 158, 278–81, 283, 289–91, 361 Prince Henry, 278, 280, 283, 360 Procopius, 60–61 projection, 20, 29, 32, 34, 59, 63–64, 66, 71 Ptolemy, Claudius, 12, 14, 29–31, 33–35, 38, 58–68, 71–74, 146, 209–20, 223–26, 229, 241, 247, 249, 251–52, 258–59, 267, 281; Ptolemaic model, 40, 59, 71, 73, 219, 230; neo-Ptolemaic model, 58, 63 Pugan, 96–97

435

Qing dynasty, 90, 94, 102–3, 109, 117, 120–23, 129 Qing River, 137, 140, 144 Qingkou, 141–42 Quanzhou (Fuzhou), 12, 80, 95–98, 100–102, 107–8, 110, 121–22, 124, 130 Qubilai, 164, 170, 172–74, 176

Ramadan, 276, 282 ̣ 228, Rashid al-Din Fad ̣lallāh Tabīb, 238–39 rectangular world maps, 20, 29–30, 32–35, 40 Red Sea, 61, 80, 283 relief printing, 124–25 Renaissance, 57–59, 63–64, 66, 71, 73–75, 162, 245, 251 resist-paste technique, 120, 125 Rheticus, 221–22 Rockhill, W. W., 93–95, 98–109, 114–16, 316, 318 Roger II of Sicily, 33, 49, 51, 56, 305–6 Roger III, 49–50, 55–56, 305 Roman Empire, 73, 75 Rosh Hashanah, 276, 282 Russia, 94, 154, 158–59, 329, 343 Ryūkyū Kingdom, 12, 117, 120–26, 132–33, 321

Sabra, Abdelhamid I., 260, 263, 350, 272 Safavids, 12, 80, 83, 85–87, 89 Safina-yi Tabriz, 232, 234–35 Sahara, 157, 360 Saliba, George, 6, 227, 241

436

INDEX

Sanfoqi, 96, 100, 107, 114 Sanskrit, 8–9, 277 Saracens, 240, 247 sarasa, 119–20 Satsuma, 123, 125, 321 Saturn, 210, 216, 219–21, 255 Scandinavia, 31, 34, 154–55, 160 scapulimancy, 170–71 scientific translation, 13, 164–67, 169, 175–76 Scorpio, 255, 361 sea routes, 133, 278 Secret History of the Mongols, 167, 169–70 Sefardi, 19, 29, 31, 37–38, 302 Selden Map of China, 12, 87, 89–90 Seljuk, 233, 236. See also Seljuqs Seljuqs, 84, 232. See also Seljuk Seville, 65, 238, 244 shaman, 167–69, 232, 264, 332 Shanghai, 101, 104–5, 319 shi theory, 134–35, 137–43 shushi, 173, 334 Siam, 86, 90, 105, 114, 121–22 Siberia, 31, 106, 158 Sibylla of Acerra, 49–50 Sicily, 33, 35, 37, 41–42, 48–53, 56, 116, 245, 306–7 Siculo-Arab cartography, 41, 53 silk roads, 78, 106, 281 silk, 122–26, 131–33, 164, 320 silver, 33, 89, 122, 125, 141, 164 Sinology, 94, 136 Sinus Gangeticus, 58–60, 62, 64–65, 67–68, 72 Sinus Magnus, 64, 68 Song-era China, 12, 79, 94–97, 107– 9, 137–38, 144–45, 193, 200–201, 203, 228, 262, 268

South America, 86, 149–50, 161–62, 290 South China Sea, 83, 86, 89, 100, 109, 121, 279, 283 South Seas, 104–7, 109 Spain, 43–44, 46, 65, 107, 121, 154–59, 214, 245, 278, 290, 360–61 Speculum astronomiae (Magnus), 249, 256 Spice Islands, 82, 283, 289–90 Sri Lanka, 52–53 Srivijaya, 100, 107 Star Catalogue (Zij-i Ilkhani), 228, 234–37, 238, 265 stencils, 117, 119–20, 124–26, 129, 131, 321 Strabo, 62–63, 68 Strasburg, 59, 67 Stupor Mundi, 41, 57 sugar cane, 122, 124 Sulu, 83, 121 Sumatra, 81–82, 100, 102, 105, 114–16, 121 Sun Yi, 126, 128, 322 sweet potato, 122, 124 Syria, 48, 187, 300, 352

T-O map, 11, 41–43, 47 Tabriz, 227, 231, 233, 235–36, 238–40, 242, 264 Taiwan, 65, 94, 121 Taj al-azyaj (al-Marhribi), 232–33 Tanba no Masatada, 194, 199–200 Tanba no Yasuyori, 192–94, 198–205, 339 Tanba no Yukinaga, 199–200 Tancred of Lecce, 49–51, 305 Tang dynasty, 78–79, 96, 105–6, 144, 200, 262, 268, 355

INDEX

tapir, 149–50, 152–53, 156–58, 161–62, 328 Taşköprizade, Ahmed, 184, 186–87 terrestrial radii, 210–12, 215–16, 219–20, 225 Thābit ibn Qurra, 194–95 The Essence of Astronomy (al-Tūsī), 232, 234 Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Ortelius), 59, 65 theosophy (ḥikmat), 266–67 Tian Zhongliang, 170, 172–74 Tibet-Yunnan, 68, 72 Tibet, 68, 70, 94, 167, 169, 231–32, 262 Tigris, 60, 62 Timurid, 79–80, 83 Tokugawa Japan, 90, 120, 205, 321 Toledo, 5, 35–36, 239, 278 tölgeci, 168–69 Tribute of Yu. See Yu Gong trigonometry, 15, 76, 275–77, 279, 281, 283–84, 289–91

Uighur, 105, 167 Urdu, 13, 182

Venice, 59, 66–67 Venus, 210–15, 219, 221–22, 225, 361 vernacular disease, 179–80 Verse Treatise on Predictions Based on the Moon’s Zodiacal Sign (Tūsī), 234–35 Virgil, 60, 62

waterways, 4, 62, 64, 101 waterworks, 136–38, 146 weaving, 122–23, 131, 321

437

William II, 48–49, 51, 305–6 William III, 49–50, 57, 305 woodblock printing, 78, 125, 129, 131 xing, 135, 137–38, 140, 324 Xu Baoguang, 123, 132–33, 321

Yamaguchi Sōki, 126, 128–29 Yanagi Sōetsu, 118–20, 133, 320 Yangtze River, 65, 70–71, 143 Yellow River, 13, 135–37, 139–46 Yemen, 80–81, 83, 86, 89 Yersinia pestis (Y. pestis), 177–78 yin-yang, 169–70, 172–73, 333 Yu Gong (Tribute of Yu), 96, 146 Yu the Great, 138, 146 Yuan dynasty, 164, 166, 168–69, 172, 174–75, 234, 237, 262–74, 356 Yuan Shikai, 95, 103 yūzen (dyeing), 119–20

Zacuto, Abraham, 285, 287, 361–63 Zafar, 80–81, 87 Zhao Rugua (Chau Ju-Kua), 94–95, 97, 102, 107–8 Zhenla, 96, 100, 108 Zhepo, 96, 100 Zhongguo, 96, 108 Zhou Huang, 123, 132–33 Zhu fan zhi (Chu-fan-chȉ), 93–95, 98, 102, 106–8, 110, 113 Zhu Yuanzhang, 262–63, 268–70, 272, 355 Zij-i Ilkhani. See Star Catalogue