Avenues of knowledge
frequently visited and prayed in the Islamic shrine known as the Dome of the Rock. The crusaders had transformed the building into a church, which they called ‘Templum Domini’, or the Temple of the Lord. Al-Harawi, who was fanatical about alchemy, was a regular feature in the royal court of Jerusalem’s King Amalric.
More importantly, in his
al-Harawi criticised and deconstructed many of the popular customs of making pilgrimage to particular shrines and religious sanctuaries in Palestine and the surrounding regions as reflective of popular Muslim superstitions and false associations. Yet his observations attest to numerous cases of Muslims, Christians and Jews converging on the same spots to worship. Some of these locations were under crusader rule; others were under Muslim rule.
It must be made clear that what I am talking about here is not a convivencia – the disputed ‘golden age’ of tolerance that supposedly existed between faith groups in medieval Andalusia – but instead a complex web of interactions between crusaders and Muslims that cannot and must not be reduced to one thing only: violence.
In the history of the transmission of knowledge between the Islamic civilisation, which featured a burgeoning scientific culture, and medieval Europe, two main avenues have been identified. One was through medieval Spain, which has received most of the modern scholarly attention. The other is via the Byzantine empire. There is also Sicily, but attention to this possibility has largely been limited to Frederick’s reign in the 1200s. Another location that witnessed the direct exchange of knowledge was crusader Antioch. Pisans, in particular, benefited from the fact that they had developed a commercial base in the city, picking up a lot of Arabic scientific books which they brought home and translated into Latin.
It was in Antioch in the 1120s that Stephen of Pisa (see box, p66) came across Ali ibn al-Abbas al-Majusi’s 10th-century Kitab al-Malaki (‘The Complete Book on the Craft of Medicine’), translated it into Latin and then brought it home to Italy. For several centuries, the book