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Notes on Contributors
Fabio Acerbi is chargé de recherche at the cnrRs. He specializes in editing and studying Greek and Byzantine mathematical and astronomical texts.
Anne-Laurence Caudano (PhD Cantab., 2005) is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Winnipeg. Her recent work focuses on Late Byzantine and Slavic cosmographical texts, maps and diagrams, as well as on the astronomical miscellanies of John Chortasmenos.
Gonzalo Cruz Andreotti is Professor in Ancient history at the University of Malaga, where he also obtained his doctorate and held a research fellowship. He expanded his studies at the universities of Roma Tor Vergata-Roma II and Perugia, both in Italy, and at the University of the Basque Country in Spain. He currently studies different, yet closely related topics: ancient geographical thought, Iberian geography, ancient ethnic identities in Hispania—in particular concerning Turdetania—and more specifically, concrete studies on authors, such as Polybius, Strabo and Pliny.
Katerina Ierodiakonou is Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Athens and at the University of Geneva. She has published extensively on ancient and Byzantine philosophy, especially in the areas of epistemology and logic. She is currently working on a monograph about ancient theories of colour, as well as on an edition, translation, and commentary of Theophrastus’ De sensibus and of Michael Psellos’ paraphrase of Aristotle’s De interpretatione.
Hervé Inglebert is Professor of Roman History at Université Paris Nanterre, where he specialises in the cultural and religious developments that occurred during Late Antiquity. On these themes he has published three books, an atlas and dozens of articles, and organised and edited several symposia. He has been both a junior and senior member of the Institut universitaire de France. He has spoken at many conferences and given lectures in Europe, North America and Asia (China, Japan). He edits the international “Revue de I'Antiquité tardive” and the “Nouvelle Clio” history collection at the PUF (Presses Universitaires de France). Inglebert also takes an interest in the epistemology of the human and social sciences, as well as the historiography of universal history, on which he has written two books: Le Monde, l’Histoire. Essai sur les histoires universelles (2014) and Histoire universelle ou histoire globale ? (2018). Between 2016-18 he was co-director of a research project on the theme “Universal histories and universal museums” with Sandra Kemp (Victoria & Albert Museum) and André Delpuech (Musée du Quai Branly).
Stavros Lazaris is chargé de recherche at the cnrs and former General Secretary of the Laboratory of Excellence “Religions and Societies in the Mediterranean World (RESMED)”. His research and teaching concerns the history of Byzantine civilization, including the study of original documents related to the history of science and technology. Since his doctoral thesis (published by Brepols in the “Bibliologia’” collection in 2010), he has worked on medieval illustrations and their place in the transmission of medical and scientific knowledge to Byzantium. Horses and their role in the army and the economy of Late Antiquity and Byzantium is another major theme of his research. He has also written on visual cultures and, since his habilitation (published by sIsMEL in the “Micrologus’ Library” collection in 2016), he is interested in the Christianization of pagan scientific literature.
Divna Manolova is Postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Medieval Literature (University of Southern Denmark and University of York) where she is developing a monograph on spatiality, aesthetics and wonder in Byzantine cosmological texts and diagrams. She has published on Nikephoros Gregoras’ philosophical and astronomical thought and on Byzantine epistolography more generally and is currently co-editing a volume on Byzantine commentaries on ancient texts (with B. van den Berg and P. Marciniak). Divna obtained her PhD in Medieval Studies at Central European University (2014) and was a Marie Sktodowska-Curie/POLONEZ 1 fellow at the University of Silesia in Katowice (2016-2018).
Maria K. Papathanassiou is Professor Emerita at the Department of Mathematics at the University of Athens. She specializes in Greek and Byzantine Science (Mathematics, Astronomy, Archaeoastronomy) and Occult Sciences (Astrology, Alchemy). She focuses her research on the personality of Stephanos of Alexandria studying his lectures On the Great and sacred art of chrysopoeia, of which critical edition recently published, and the astrological treatise on the Horoscope of Islam attributed to him, on which subjects she published several articles. Her recent publications also include articles on Archaeoastronomy, as the “Reflections on the Antikythera mechanism inscriptions,” Advances in Space Research, 46 (2010), pp. 545-551.
Inmaculada Pérez Martin is Scientific Researcher at the Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Languages and Cultures, cs1c-Madrid. She is specializing in Byzantine Cultural History, Transfer of scientific knowledge in Byzantium, Greek Paleography, Transmission of Classical Texts in Byzantium, Edition of Byzantine texts.
Antonio Ricciardetto concluded his PhD in Languages and Literature at the University of Liege in 2015 with a dissertation on Greek documentary papyri of medical content. After having been a research and teaching assistant at the Collége de France (2016-2018), he is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Paris-Sciences-etLettres Research University, within the Interdisciplinary and Strategic Research Initiative “Scripta-psL. The History and Practices of Writing” (2018-2019). Carrying research in the fields of papyrology and history of medicine, he is a statutory member of the centre “Byzantine Civilization” (UMR 8167 Orient & Méditerranée), a member of the CEDOPAL of the University of Liége and the secretary of the Belgian Society of Byzantine Studies. He is the author of LAnonyme de Londres (P.Lit.Lond. 165, Brit.Libr. inv. 137). Edition et traduction d'un papyrus médical grec du I*” siécle apr. J.-C. (Liége, 2014; Paris, 2016), and the co-editor of the volume En marge du Serment hippocratique : contrats et serments dans le monde gréco-romain. Actes de la Journée d’étude internationale. Liége, 29 octobre 2014 (Liége, 2017).
Thomas Salmon is PhD candidate at Sorbonne-Université. He is also part of the “Byzantine World” research team of the UMR 8167 Orient & Méditerranée (CNRS) and received a grant from the French Ministry of the Armed Forces. He currently studies Byzantine cavalry warfare, linking the relationship between the soldier and the horse in the Byzantine world. He also works on the archaeology of weapons and horse equipment and their representations in Byzantine art.
Ioannis Telelis is Senior Researcher at the Research Centre for Greek and Latin Literature, Academy of Athens, Greece. He specialises in critical editions of Byzantine texts on natural philosophy, and his recent publications include: Georgios Pachymeres, Philosophia. Book 5. Commentary in Aristotle’s Meteorologica. Editio princeps. Prolegomena-Text-Indices, Athens 2012; Georgios Pachymeres, Philosophia. Book 3. In Aristotelis de Caelo Commentary. Editio princeps. Prolegomena-Text-Indices, Athens 2016.
Anne Tihon is Professeur Emerita of the Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-laNeuve, Belgium. She taught Byzantine History and Civilization, Byzantine Texts, History of Science in Antiquity, Greek palaeography, Methodology of edition of Ancient Texts. She provided critical editions of the commentaries of Theon of Alexandria in Ptolemy’s Handy Tables and several editions of Byzantine astronomical texts; with Jean-Luc Fournet, the edition and analysis of the astronomical papyrus P. Fouad inv. 267A. She is Director of the Corpus des Astronomes Byzantins. She is working on a critical edition of Ptolemy’s Handy Tables.
Alain Touwaide is a Classicist, a Byzantinist, and an Arabist, Alain Touwaide specializes in the History of Medicine and the Life Sciences. He has had an unconventional transdisciplinary career spent in Medical Schools, Colleges of Pharmacy, and Faculties of Sciences. After 15 years at the Natural History Museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC (usA), he is now affiliated with the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) (USA), where he is the Program Director of the Medical Humanities and Ethnobotany Initiative. He has taught and lectured all over the world and has authored numerous publications with a particular interest in the making of medical and lifesciences knowledge and its transmission across the Mediterranean World from Antiquity to the Renaissance and later.
Arnaud Zucker is Professor of ancient Greek language and literature, at the University of Nice Céte d'Azur (FR), and deputy director of Cepam (UMR 7264, CNRS). His key research topics are ancient zoology, ancient astronomy, and mythography. He published numerous papers on the transmission of zoological knowledge and is leading the international research network Zoomathia. He published Les classes zoologiques en Gréce ancienne d’Homere a Elien (2005), Aristote et les classifications zoologiques (2015) and translated in French Aelian’s Natura Animalium and the Physiologos. He is currently working (edition and commentary) on the zoological encyclopaedia of Constantine v1. He recently published L’encyclopédie du ciel. Mythologie, astronomie, astrologie (Paris, 2016) and Lire les mythes. Formes, usages et visées des pratiques mythographiques de l’Antiquité a la Renaissance (A. Zucker, J. Fabre-Serris, J.-Y. Tilliette, G.Besson [eds.], Lille, 2016)
Introduction
Stavros Lazaris
This volume is the result of a two-year collaboration between thirteen scholars of Byzantium focussing on scientific disciplines between the fourth and the fifteenth centuries. Regardless of the complexities of the various scientific fields and approaches taken by each researcher in his or her chapter, the common thread that binds this collective effort is the necessity to correct two general misconceptions about the nature of the scientific contribution of Byzantium. Indeed, for a long time, the general consensus among Byzantine specialists was that Byzantine scholars did not produce innovative scientific contributions.
However, many authors in this volume, often basing their work on unpublished materials or approaches, demonstrate the opposite. To this day many historians of science still believe that science only emerged in the modern era, thus denying Byzantine production any scientific value. This misconception is due to the way in which they understand the Middles Ages and their use of the term “science.” Both need to be clarified for each period under scrutiny and recontextualised.
1 Current Debates in the History of Science
11 The Traditional Narrative of the History of Science, from the Greeks to the Byzantines
Science as rational thought was born in the archaic age, in the seventh century BCE under the impetus of several thinkers and philosophers, some focussing on cosmology or physical speculation while others were religious leaders. From this period onwards, Greek science began to develop in Ionian cities such as Miletus, Chios and Samos. For some Ionian thinkers natural phenomena could be explained by natural causes, which led to the first scientific demonstrations ever produced. Thales (625-547 BCE), Anaximenes (585-525 BCE), Pythagoras (570-480 BCE) or Heraclitus (550-480 BCE) proceeded intellectually by a process of confronting arguments and contributed, each in his own way, to the birth of mathematics, astronomy and musical theory.
In the wake of these precursors, Greek thought eventually grew up around several schools. Some of these were contemporary, others developed in close succession over three productive centuries in a relatively restricted geographical area; from this arose the first scientific controversies and historical markers. However, it is only with Aristotle that science acquired a method based on deduction. To him we owe the first formulation of syllogisms and induction. Concepts such as material, shape and action became the first elements of abstract thought. For Aristotle, science was subordinated to philosophy (it was a “secondary” philosophy)! and its aim was to search for first principles and first causes that scientific discourse would later call causality, and philosophy would call Aristotelianism.
Before he founded the Lyceum, Aristotle was entrusted by Philip 11 with the education of his son Alexander (the Great). After the latter’s death, his immense empire was shared out between his generals. Egypt, which was ruled by Alexander from 332, went to Ptolemy Soter who took the title of king and founded the Ptolemaic dynasty. The new Egyptian dynasty was primarily Greek: it marked the end of two centuries of Persian influence over the country and ended permanently the reign of indigenous Pharaohs. It strove to restore Egypt’s greatness in a world that was now Greek. This period is marked by significant discoveries, especially in astronomy, mathematics and the medical sciences.
For many scholars, this unprecedented development of Greek science is bound to the Ptolemies’ cultural agenda. They designed and built the great library of Alexandria and bequeathed generous funds to ensure that it would become an essential centre of learning in the Hellenistic world. The library was already conceived in the early planning of the city and became the main instrument of influence of Ptolemaic Egypt. It is estimated that by 48 BCE, it contained up to 700,000 papyrus rolls.2 The Ptolemies strongly supported and contributed to both the library and the Museum that was connected to it. Not only did these two institutions preserve a wealth of knowledge, but they were also a vibrant space for all the great thinkers and scholars of the Hellenistic world.
Thereafter, Alexandria became the capital of a Roman province, and lived through the vicissitudes of the Roman and Byzantine empires, until the ancient capital of the Ptolemies was seized by the Arabs, led by Amr ibn Al-Asi, lieutenant of the caliph Omar. For six centuries between the fall of the Ptolemaic dynasty (31 BCE) and the Arab conquest (December 22, 640), Alexandria pursued its vocation to be a major scientific research centre, including medical research. However, little by little, through the prism of Christianity and a new society that emerged from profound socio-cultural changes, the scientific knowledge produced in this mythical city and throughout the Mediterranean world, would never be quite the same.
Numerous epistemologists identify a decline in scientific production in the centuries that followed. These same researchers also believe that the only scientific contribution of the Byzantines was to have preserved the knowledge of their ancestors and transmitted it directly or indirectly to the West. K. Vogel, in his monograph on Byzantine science concedes that “Byzantium is important in the history of science” but then goes on to say: “not because any appreciable additions were made to the knowledge already attained by the Greeks of the Hellenistic era, but because the Byzantines preserved the solid foundations laid in antiquity until such time as the Westerners had at their disposal other means of recovering this knowledge.”*
Preserving this knowledge was undoubtedly a sacred cause for the Byzantines and they often copied manuscripts solely to preserve scientific literature. Generally, the Byzantines saw books as the guardians of their civilization, since the knowledge of their ancestors was recorded in their pages. That knowledge had to be protected by copying new manuscripts, so that thereafter the fate of their books became one of their major concerns.
But does this mean preservation was their only contribution to science? This is a crucial question for if we answer in the affirmative, it might undermine the very rationale for yet another book on the topic.
1.2 Criticisms of Byzantine Science
1.2.1 Was There a “Science” Prior to Galileo?
Before we consider several approaches and offer some answers, let us ask another question, related to the first and just as important: is there such a thing as science in the period we are interested in? In other words, can the Byzantine production in fields as diverse as astronomy, mathematics, medicine, botany, zoology or alchemy and astrology be characterized as scientific? According to several modern scholars, defining this production during the Middle Ages raises a number of problems, starting with the method that was followed by Byzantine scholars.
Since the “Galilean revolution” science is characterised by the combination of three requirements:®
1. Science is a “reality,’ whichever interpretation philosophers confer on the term.
2. Science seeks an “explanation,” ie. the insertion of reality that it describes in an abstract system of concepts, overflowing with singular facts brought about by experimentation.’
3. Science complies with criteria of “validity” that are explicitly formulated and consensual.
For many specialists, there was no science before the existence of technical means of observation for accurate measurements, the exclusive reliance on observation or experimentation (thus excluding philosophical and religious aspects or qualitative physics) in the argumentation, the formulation of laws in mathematical language forming the basis of confirmable predictions and the existence of a structured sociology of scholars.® Of course, based on such a configuration, the Byzantine approach to research cannot be considered to be scientific, at least not as we know it through the published preserved texts and what we know of their scholarly societies. There is no indication that the re- quirements mentioned above were ever applied in full, persistently and by a large body of scholars.
However in varying degrees, this was also the case in Antiquity and the Western and Arab-Muslim Middle Ages, until the early Renaissance. Indeed, and without wishing to generalize, for the medieval scholar, heir to Aristotelian epistemology, what was scientific was logically demonstrable.? The experimental approach was in its infancy and very ambiguous. Even in medicine, where—as was often repeated after Galen—experience and reasoning are “the two legs” on which the medical arts rest (ott yap ev TH iatpixh wo dbo oxEAy, éumetota te xal Adyoc) the notion of experience (which includes experience and experimentation) is understood in two ways: either as an empirical process of trial and error, or as an experiment conducted systematically, but with unreliable results because it is subject to variations that are difficult to explain rationally.
Let us point out from the start that to apply to Byzantine culture the criteria listed above with the aim of excluding the possible existence of scientific thought processes is foolish. It reveals a fundamental ignorance and misunderstanding of the ways in which the Byzantines thought and functioned. One cannot pretend to understand a past culture without a rigorous historical approach and that culture must be measured using its own units of measurement. In A. Gourevitch’s words, the idea that human nature and particularly human psychology was a constant throughout history was believed by some of the greatest historians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. J. Burckhardt took as the starting point of his Considerations on Universal History man “as he is, as he has always been and as he should be.” Therefore, we substituted modern Western European men for men of other periods and cultures. There is no universal yardstick, applicable to all civilizations and all eras because there are no two identical men in any period.
Sciences differ from one another in their methods, their fundamental statements, their procedures of investigation and verification, their theoretical models, and their development. To persevere us in this belief would mean, as L. Giard aptly suggests that we would be erecting a specific science at a given moment of its history as a model of scientific excellence, then demand that all other types of knowledge, in order to become a science should present equivalent elements, taking into account the variations between the objects of study."
The Issue of Progress in Byzantine Science
Besides the above-mentioned criticism of their working methods, Byzantine scholars also suffer from another deprecating judgment from some modern scientists.’ One often reads that Byzantine science, throughout the eleven centuries of the Empire’s existence, made no substantial progress. This negative assessment is used as a pretext to sweep away most Byzantine scientific contributions. But this attitude is somewhat naive. From the point of view of the accumulation of knowledge alone, Byzantium provides evidence of continuous progress! And, if one understands progress in terms of qualitative leaps, there have also been, in some scientific fields at least, notable advances and this is confirmed by some of the chapters in this volume, highlighting cutting-edge and often unpublished research.
Generally speaking, no matter how the idea of progress is conceived, it was irrelevant to medieval culture. While science since the seventeenth century shares a privileged relationship with the idea of a progress, this was not the case in the Byzantine period. In other words, the Byzantines did not see scientific production as an evolutionary process building on the scientific knowledge of their predecessors. If a history of Byzantine science must account for transformations and changes, the reader should not expect to be presented with a progress-to-date report. As G. Canguilhem wrote, the history of science is not an inverted account of scientific progress, a visualisation of outdated stages, with today’s truth as its vanishing point. It should be an effort to find and understand how outdated notions or attitudes or methods were, in their own time, a progress and therefore how an outdated past should retain a scientific label. Understanding the directives of a period is as important as explaining their destruction in later periods.
1.3 The Byzantine Epistemological Context
1.3.1 Issues of Terminology
One should add to these two critical attitudes towards Byzantine scholars and their scientific output the contemporary debate around the term “science” found in many publications. Is one justified in using this term to refer to knowledge that predates the historical conception of what is considered science today?
For some researchers, this term should be restricted to what corresponds closely to the sciences in their current form. Another option is to extend, by analogy, the use of the term “science” to periods that predate the first so-called “scientific revolution” (the seventeenth century), although the idea itself of a “scientific revolution” linked to a specific historical period is increasingly called into question. To avoid confusion, some researchers propose to use terms like “knowledge” or “proto-science” instead of “science.”* But these other words, tend to stigmatize former scientific production and create more confusion than clarification. In truth, to try to define criteria to distinguish “prescientific” knowledge from “scientific” knowledge is a methodological aberration.
Even though the word is of Latin origin, “science” is amodern not an ancient category. It derived from the verb scire “to know,’ and its adjectival present participle form, sciens, “who knows, is educated, has knowledge of.” The substantive scientia, “knowledge, science [in the broad sense]” is abundantly attested in classical Latin. In the words of J. Weisheipl, “in early Latin usage the verb simply meant to discern, or to penetrate to the bottom in the sense of cutting a situation to its very roots. Thus in Latin the term Scientia was used to designate a discerning, penetrating, intellectual grasp of a situation or of a given subject.” The word scientia then passed into Christian and medieval Latin. Thus, Boethius, in his translation of Aristotle’s Categories (In Categorias) translated the Greek episteme by scientia. Around 1260 William of Moerbeke made the same choice as Boethius for the couple episteme-scientia in his own translation of the Categories.
In Greek, the term episteme refers to knowledge that is true and certain, related to the verb epistasthai, knowledge, whose etymological meaning (epi [over] + histasthai [to stand]) is “to be placed above,’ that is to say, “dominate” the subject of study.!6 If Plato was aporetic in the Theaetetus,!” Aristotle, however, thought that episteme referred to general theoretical knowledge (Nicomachean Ethics, 1094a, 1140a).!® He distinguished experience (empeiria) or knowledge of individual things, art (techne) or the practical knowledge of universal things and certain knowledge (episteme) or the intellectual knowledge of first causes and principles of beings. This idea of a philosophical knowledge deriving from the causes suggests that episteme included the mathemata in the Pythagorean sense,!® as well as the rational knowledge obtained by reasoning “according to the logos,” i.e., according to reason.?°
Besides episteme (knowledge) in ancient Greek, one also finds the terms philosophia (love of wisdom, philosophy), theoria (contemplation, speculation) and peri physeos historia (a survey of nature). They are all employed in specific contexts where their translation by the word “science” is (or at least should be) obvious and hardly risks misleading the reader. But if these terms are used to designate certain intellectual disciplines we think of as scientific, each time the term is used it may mean something quite different from our term ‘“science.” By using the term “science” the authors of this book, starting with myself, are aware of this issue. They use it as a shorthand to refer to certain Byzantine ideas and theories of Byzantine authors.”
1.3.2 The Byzantine Epistemological Postulate
Even if Byzantine society did not develop science as it is understood in modern and contemporary times, after this brief overview we can, I think, use the word science and identify the (literary, visual, technological) production of certain Byzantine scholars as scientific while remembering that, with regard to our current usage, the term is ambiguous. Byzantine scholars for the most part tried to explain and understand nature through the almost exclusive prism of the new religion, a worldview which may seem today to be strange and irrational. In a famous historical anecdote, Napoleon 1 flipping through the pages of Pierre-Simon Laplace's Celestial Mechanics, wondered why there was no mention of God anywhere in his treatise. Laplace answered: “God? Sire, I did not need that hypothesis.” In his view, God was a hypothesis that explained everything but did not predict anything, which is why it was not used in the context of scientific research. And indeed, modern science does not require an initial motor, ora higher reason, a god, a creator, regardless of the name that we want to give this numinous force.
However, we risk completely misunderstanding the culture of the Middle Ages if we were to think that ignorance and obscurantism prevailed because their system of thought was theocentric. The Byzantines were unable to explain the world and orient themselves without this “hypothesis” which was not for them a hypothesis, but a postulate, an absolute necessity for their worldview and their conscience. What may seem wrong for us today was not for men of that time, for whom God was a supreme truth which extended into all their representations and ideas, a truth to which all their cultural and social values referred.
Scientific curiosity among Byzantine scholars was often not expressed in the same way as it is today. This does not mean that the fruit of their intellectual effort was less scientific. Until recently, it was still claimed that if there was no third dimension in Byzantine art, it was because the Byzantines did not know how to do it. This was not, however, the result of ignorance since their ancestors were already significantly advanced in this field. In fact, in Byzantine art, space was considered to lie beyond the province of rational inquiry. The old Hellenistic systems of representation were abandoned. And the rejection of the third dimension was a conscious refusal, because the worldview had changed and consequently the role of art had changed with it. A similar observation must be applied to the way the Byzantines practiced science.
1.3.3 The Origin of Byzantine Knowledge
Now let us return to the issue of the Byzantine contribution. Does it limit itself, as it is often claimed, to keeping and transmitting ancestral knowledge? From the outset we should remind ourselves that not all Byzantines respected the writings of their Hellenic forebears. In fact, several Byzantine scholars rejected ancient scientific writings suspecting them of paganism.
This declared hostility to the knowledge found in pagan books is found in many authors, like John Philoponus in the sixth century,?” Ioannis Psichaitae in the ninth century’ or Basil Camateros in the twelfth century.4 Even if sometimes their opinions were not as clear-cut as portrayed in modern studies, the few Byzantines mentioned here are known to have explicitly shown their hostility to ancient scientific writing.2° As pagans they considered it unnecessary to know God or save one’s soul.?® Conversely, many scholars were interested in Hellenic science.2” They studied it and not only did they try to preserve it but they also tried to contribute to it and develop it out of their worldview and with the means at their disposal.2® Some did not hesitate, moreover, to challenge the ideas of their ancestors, even some of the most illustrious thinkers like Aristotle or Ptolemy and turned to works from other cultures, Western, Arab or Persian.
Byzantine science was a product of two sources. On the one hand were the numerous scientific treatises from antiquity. These never ceased to be copied through all the centuries of Byzantine history, often accompanied by commentaries emanating from the schools of Alexandria, Athens, or Syria at the end of antiquity. This was a constant source of nourishment for Byzantium’s scientifically-minded scholars. On the other hand, there was foreign material, mainly of Islamic origin but also Latin and Hebrew, which often inspired their work.
2 A New Perspective on Byzantine Science
2.1 Openness to External Knowledge and Byzantine Innovations It would be inappropriate to list in this introduction the scientific exchanges with and influences of works by other cultures on Byzantine production.?9 Let us note, however, that scientific contacts between the Byzantines and scholars of neighbouring cultures were in place earlier than was recently thought. On this topic, M. Mavroudi wrote: “A number of Greek texts on empirical science that were written before the year 1000 are either avowed translations from Arabic originals or indirectly indicate earlier Byzantine contact with Arabic science.”30
If we focus on astronomy for example, it is now certain that, at least from the eleventh century, and based on the evidence of some translations of Arabic star catalogues, Islamic astronomy began to be familiar to the Byzantines. This included the writings of Symeon Seth (and possibly the scholium of 1032 to the Prolegomena to the Almagest), and an anonymous astronomical treatise written between 1072 and 1088.*! Even Isaac Argyros, who is generally represented as a fervent defender of Ptolemy’s astronomy, demonstrates a definite interest in Persian astronomy.3? Around 1347, George Chrysococces wrote a treatise entitled Persian Syntaxis based on the Zij-i Ilkhani of Nasir al-Din at-Tisi. The Persian Syntaxis was widely diffused, and its circulation was established in the second half of the fourteenth century and the fifteenth century. Chrysococces’ writing follows the work of Gregory Chioniades, who lived approximately between 1240 and 1320.
In the early 1290s he travelled to the court of the [l-Khans at Tabriz, where he studied astronomy under Shams al-Din al-Bukhari. Between November 1295 and November 1296 Shams dictated to him (in Persian) the rules for using the ‘Ala Tables of al-Fahhad, which Chioniades rendered into barbaric Greek as the Persian Astronomical Composition. Chioniades was back in Trebizond by September 1301 and later in Constantinople. He trained students in Constantinople in Persian astronomy and medicine. Furthermore, three Jewish astronomical works were the object of Byzantine adaptation: the Six Wings (Shesh Kenaphayim) of Emmanuel Bonfils of Tarascon (c. 1365); the Cycles of Bonjorn (Jacob ben David Yom-Tob, Perpignan, c. 1361); and the Plane Way (Orah Selulah) of Isaac ben Salomon ben Zaddig Alhadib. Western astronomy was introduced into the Byzantine milieux of Cyprus around 1340 (in a treatise on the astrolabe, Toledan Tables), and in 1380 Demetrius Chrysoloras composed a Greek adaptation of the Alfonsine Tables. In 1252, during the Latin occupation of Constantinople, a treatise (Great Computation according to the Indians) was written on the use of Indian numerals. It is not clear whether it was based directly on an Arabic source (it transliterates some Arabic technical terms and uses the epoch of the Hijra in an example) ora Latin version like the Book of the Abacus of Leonardo of Pisa (who is known to have visited Constantinople).#%
Astronomy, but also medicine, including hippiatrics, was one of the scientific fields in which some Byzantine scholars were cautiously following the achievements of the Greeks and Romans. Indeed, it should be noted that since H.-J. Sévilla’s seminal work, we now know that Byzantine veterinarians understood and exploited the writings of their immediate predecessors and they also inherited knowledge from the Egyptian and Babylonian civilisations.3+ Although this was not the case for all Byzantine veterinarians, some at least did not hesitate to turn to treaties from other cultures. Similarly, within human medicine, we know that Byzantine doctors did not simply parrot and transmit verbatim ancient written sources, but used them carefully, rearranging, truncating, and supplementing them out of contemporary experience. Close examination of Aetios of Amida’s use of Galen’s notions of drug theory, for example, shows how Aetios chose precisely those passages that would explain the Galenic idea of “drugs by degrees,’ a classification system of pharmaceuticals that would be the standard in medicine until the eighteenth century.
Certainly as a tributary of Greco-Roman ideas, Byzantine medicine was enriched over the centuries by other traditions and developed as a scientific domain, alive and innovative. While they were recovering, reorganizing, and diffusing the Greek legacy, Byzantine scholars were also assimilating Arabic medicine, including medical botany. As A. Touwaide pointed out, Arabic and Greek plant specialists might have been working together in Constantinople, giving the Byzantines access to Arabic plant science (see chapter 10 of this volume). Among others, Symeon Seth shows traces of Arabic experiments. AlRazi’s brief treatise De Pestilentia was translated from the Greek (mpi Aowtnis). Indeed, as noted by B. Mondrain, “from the thirteenth century, translations from the Arabic, Persian or Latin are widely disseminated.”*> Thus, in addition to the al-Razi’s text, one might mention Ibn al-Gazzar’s Ephodia (EqSta tod &modynuobvtos)%® the translation of which is attributed to Constantine of Reggio, a physician from Southern Italy in the eleventh century.?”
Nicholas Myrepsos is probably the author of a late Byzantine compilation of pharmaceutical recipes, collected in a work called the Dynameron and attributed to “Nicholas.” Nicholas Myrepsos (Mupewpdc, lit. “preparer of unguents”) is traditionally identified with the Nicholas who was chief physician at the court of John 111 Vatatzes in 1241. According to the reconstructed history of this treatise, it was probably written in the second half of the thirteenth century, after a shorter book of recipes (Antidotarium parvum) by Nicholas of Salerno (twelfth century), that is to say, after a Latin text. In turn, the Greek treatise was translated into Latin from the first half of the fourteenth century by Nicholas of Reggio.?® One can also discern foreign influences, even in the teaching of scientific subjects. John Argyropoulos for example, educated in Italy (Padua), was marked by a Western influence in the way he taught medicine at the hospital attached to St. John Prodromus monastery in the neighbourhood of Petra in Constantinople.*?
Moreover, practical needs stimulated the writing of veterinary manuals, tracts on parasitology, and treatises on pharmacy. By medieval standards the practice of medicine existed at a high level of expertise: hospitals were to be found not only in Constantinople, but also in the provinces. Byzantine medicine had professional specializations, including obstetrics and gynaecology, ophthalmology, dermatology, and dentistry. Thanks to Byzantine pharmacy, many diseases received sophisticated treatments, and the medical tracts of Alexander of Tralles and Paul of Aegina show the variety of drugs prescribed for ailments of the chest, heart, digestive system, and other organs. Byzantine surgery was also highly advanced; listings of surgical instruments suggest specialized expertise, perhaps derived from the known instances of dissections and autopsies performed by Byzantine physicians and surgeons.1° The Vita Theophanis Confessoris by Nikephoros Skeuophylax written in the tenth century, mentions a fascinating surgical operation undergone by Saint Theophanes for his kidney stones (ed. de Boor, p. 23). The physicians passed instruments up Theophanes’ urinary tract, ground down the stones inside the bladder, and then allowed the fragments to pass out of the body with his own urine. Other ancient sources only mention surgeries which involved cutting into the bladder to remove the stones. This bloodless operation was a truly innovative type of surgery and well in advance of ancient practice. Even the well-versed seventh-century scholar Paul of Aegina only knew kidney-stone operations involving incisions. Thus, Byzantine “obscurantist” physicians were capable of major innovations.!
We should add to this the surgical operation that focussed on the separation of Siamese twins described in several Byzantine texts.*? Finally, let us emphasize that for the authors of a study on the “facial reconstructive procedures” performed by physicians during the Byzantine period, the principles of reconstruction “followed the same patterns of mobilisation and preparation of local flaps as those used today.’*8
As A. Mylonas, E.-F. Poulakou-Rebelakou and G. Androutsos, have noted, Byzantine physicians developed a number of interesting concepts, views and opinions referring to the field now recognized as Oral and Cranio-maxillofacial Surgery and Pathology. And they explain that the most eminent physicians of the Early (fourth—seventh centuries aD) and Middle (eighth—-twelfth centuries aD ) Byzantine Period, in particular Oribasius Pergamenus, Aétius Amidenus, Alexander Trallianus, Theophilus Protospatharius, Paulus Aegineta, Meletius Monachos, and Leo Medicus, in their works deal with topographic and surgical anatomy of the head and neck, and a large list of related topics, including dentoalveolar surgery, oral and cervicofacial infections, trauma of viscerocranium and neurocranium as well as the biomechanics of traumatic brain injuries, temporomandibular joints dysfunction as a consequence of mandibular dislocation, surgical oncology and reconstructive surgery of the head and neck, oral pathology, surgical pathology of salivary glands, therapeutic management of facial nerve dysfunction, preprosthetic surgery, craniofacial surgery, and deformities of the facial skeleton involving anthropologic and craniometric observations. Clinical examination of patients presenting corresponding functional and aesthetic problems is considered, using recognizable orthodontic and orthognathic surgical approaches.
Finally, specific bandages of the head and neck are described, for treating traumatic injuries of the viscerocranium and neurocranium, diastasis of the cranial sutures, dislocations of the mandible (unilateral and bilateral), as well as inflammatory diseases of the parotids and the neck.”44
Finally, and even if this volume does not cover technology directly (irrigation and water supply, bridges, roads, building construction, gears, water-raising machines, and Automata*®),*® we should mention, that several chapters touch on the Byzantines’ prowess and inventiveness in this area.
The fifth to the ninth centuries, for example, brought forth significant technical innovations, especially in fields like agriculture, transport, and especially military equipment and weaponry. Thus, we now know that the Byzantines knew (and probably had developed) a riding stirrup before the appearance of the Avar stirrup in about 590-600 CE. The invention of this tool, which was extremely important in ensuring increased stability for mounted archers and ensuring also shooting accuracy, opened up radical changes in the structure of the Byzantine army.*” Similarly, recent research has shown that, at least since the sixth century CE, the Byzantines used a special type of horseshoe during military campaigns.** The lateen sail, in use probably from the seventh century, made ships more responsive to the wind. Greek fire was invented in the seventh century, and finally, the water mill became a standard power source by the time of the Farmer's Law.
2.2 Another Approach to Byzantine Science
2.2.1 The Diversity of Ancient Sources
These examples show that when some Byzantine scholars needed to consult other texts than those of their ancestors, they did not hesitate to do so. Based upon their own experience they did not hesitate to improve their instruments and their surgical techniques. Therefore, in contrast to the decades-old image of a profoundly ossified group of Byzantine scholars locked within their world view and blindly fixated solely on the writings of their ancestors, we have discovered many Byzantine scholars (from a list of 240 savants that has emerged from a first survey of a work in progress) whose work has called in question these negative assumptions.
As we move forward and increase our knowledge of as yet unpublished Byzantine scientific texts we should expect further surprises. Indeed, in the field of Byzantine science, so many texts remain unedited or simply ignored that one cannot claim to be giving an all-encompassing account of Byzantine scientific achievement.
Moreover, we must not forget that, in addition to the classical Greek texts copied and preserved by the Byzantines,*9 scholars of the Western Middle Ages and, later, Renaissance humanists also had access to Byzantine commentaries on these texts. In other words, their comments, which are a neglected aspect of the Byzantine scientific contribution, have nevertheless helped expand scientific knowledge from the Renaissance onwards.
Finally, let us add to this list the Byzantine contribution to the development of science through visual documents designed and realized for many classical texts that did not originally contain images. Without wishing to expand on the subject, I will simply mention here Neophytos Prodromenos and his editorial activity in the Monastery of St. John Prodromos in Constantinople. Originally from Western Macedonia, he experienced a period of intense production between 1350 and 1365. He was the author of an epitome on logic, a Constantinopolitan version of the Corpus aristotelicum, as well as a Botanical lexicon. He also produced several manuscripts with medical content, and his work is punctuated by diagrams and figurative representations. As A. Durr explains, “this use of graphic forms is not trivial and testifies, if not a recourse to the image, at least a positive attitude towards it.’5° Many images in Byzantine scientific manuscripts are therefore original creations that often go beyond mere visual commentary. They contributed to the transmission of Byzantine scientific thought to the medieval West, before helping to shape the ideas of humanists on the scientific image and its place in intellectual work.5!
The Historical Context of Byzantine Science
The actual contribution of the Byzantines is therefore more important than has been claimed, at least in certain scientific fields. It is true, however, that during the Empire’s eleven centuries, and as was mentioned at the beginning of this introduction there was a certain decline in scientific production compared with previous historical periods. To understand this phenomenon, however, we must take into account many, technical, economic, social, political, ideological and/or religious parameters.
Byzantine science encountered many difficulties: the arrival of a new religion and the hostility of some fervent Christians to pagan scientific texts, the plague of the sixth century, the Arab invasions®* and iconoclasm.5? One can also add the lack of interest, with few exceptions, on the part of the Byzantine imperial power in scientific achievement. Except when hospitals were doubled with medical schools the Byzantine rulers in contrast to Alexandria or the Arab-Muslim world,** never created foundations devoted exclusively to science.
The few exceptions of imperial support were successful, but only occasionally because they were neither durable nor solid. A rare departure from the rule that is germane to the fields under discussion in this volume, was the so-called first Byzantine humanism.®> The lack of an educational programme, stable over time and adapted to peoples’ needs, hindered the regular and positive development of new ideas.5° In addition, as E. Nicolaidis notes, “the centralized system of Byzantium, together with the importance of the town of Constantinople compared to the other towns of the empire, prevented the development of the high schools newly created in other cities. The school of Thessalonica, the second most important city of the empire, was an exception, but it soon declined. During the same period [end of 12th C.], in the Latin West the newborn universities multiplied.
These universities, unlike Constantinople’s high schools, had a certain autonomy, at least in the appointment of professors. In centralized Byzantium, the emperor and the patriarch nominated their protégés as heads of the university and the Patriarchal School. Thus, the status and the protection provided to science by the heads of the empire carried the seeds of stagnation. Although scientific teaching progressed, there were no vigorous discussions of scientific matters.”>’ Byzantine scholars were consequently often deprived of all state aid and this was reflected in their education; many scholars were actually self-taught, men trained in the family circle, using the books of the family library, or from a master while participating in synanagnoseis (‘common readings’) in a reading circle (see below, pp. 23-24 and also chapter 2 of this volume).
Let us add that the empire has always experienced great instability and several emperors have spent the largest part of their reign in endless struggles with internal or external enemies. The insecurity and the anxiety did not favour the emergence and especially the consolidation of new ideas. There is one notable exception, however, during the rule of the Palaiologan dynasty, particularly between 1270 and 1330 (extending to 1361 and Nicephorus Gregoras’ death).5* By then, however, Byzantium was already struggling for its survival and was living the last centuries of its existence. By the 1340s, the spiritual development of hesychasm, which preached the supremacy of the religious authorities over the secular ones combined with the Black Death (1348-1453)5° to worsen an already weakened situation. None of this encouraged significant intellectual leaps of the kind that took place among, for example, the Italian humanists.
If one wants to have a clearer understanding as to why the production of new scientific ideas in the Middle Ages slowed down, particularly in Byzantium, another factor must be taken into account. This is linked to difficulties related to the accumulation of textual data, which was intertwined, inter alia, with the passage from the roll to the codex and, later, from the upper case to the lower case. In order to exploit the mass of information that was constantly increasing with successive copies and new texts, for a very long time the Byzantines sought to generate different auxiliary reading techniques. In addition, instruments (summary, tables, indexes and alphabetical tables of subjects) were gradually developed and these provided a great deal of flexibility in searching within a specific text or even within a particular manuscript, and were able to quickly identify any passage for which one might be searching.®° Thanks to all these inventions, the book as an instrument of intellectual work was born, but these changes required several centuries of reflection and testing before becoming the norm. In order to arrive at a better understanding of dwindling Byzantine scientific production these parameters should be taken into consideration.
However, even the undeniable slowness that characterized the science of the time and especially the inability of scholars to overcome decisive obstacles, did not prevent some Byzantine scholars from producing original work. We should stress that Byzantine scholars, especially during the last period of their civilisation, did not hesitate to emphasize the kainotomia in their ideas, practices, or artefacts, even though we should recognize that they lacked the kind of collective awareness of the ability to innovate seen in the West, especially from 1260.6
But in spite of all this, Byzantine science actually existed. If one were to schematize the context, one could say that it was a compromise between a tradition placed under the authority of ancient authors, a worldview dictated by Christianity and an innovation that was established mainly on a speculative basis. Even if the Byzantine knowledge of the world is now considered as mostly unfounded or false, the existence of scientific knowledge in Byzantium at that time is not a mirage, since it was widely documented (see also chapter 1 of this volume).
2.2.3 A New Definition of Byzantine Science
Furthermore, if an objective definition of science by its methods or objects is, in the long term, not relevant, we can nevertheless offer a subjective definition of science that would have been admissible from ancient times onward. This formal definition would deal with knowledge deemed certain about the world and would establish a history of mentalities and representations of certainty. Plato distinguished the doxa, the opinion, or the orthos logos, the right speech, from the episteme, defined as a conception of the soul that speech cannot undermine.® This criterion of certain knowledge, because it is demonstrated by contemporary reason, founded a series of conceptions (“Greek science,” “Byzantine science,’ “Arab-Muslim science,” “Chinese science” etc.) and what they share with current science is the same hermeneutical function. They do not refer to the same objects, methods, or truths, but in each period and in a similar fashion they signify certain knowledge, simply because it is demonstrable. There should not be a history of science, but a history of forms of reason or certainty. One could list historical situations that would define not a concept, but a notion whose epistemological status would fall under the purview of human and social sciences.® In this sense we can speak of a Byzantine science as a constellation of forms of knowledge sharing the same hermeneutic claim to certainty in a given historical context.
In this collective work, we often tend to think according to one cultural convention and reject what is obvious to another. This is not a modern phenomenon. It is not because there is not the same coherence and the same rigour in Aristotle as in the Greek Physiologus or in Zosimus of Panopolis for example, that we must exclude them from the scientific literature of the time.
All the authors of this volume agree that there is no close and direct relationship between Byzantine scientific knowledge and ours. Indeed, and without wishing to reiterate my earlier remarks, according to current criteria, alchemy, astrology, arithmology, qualitative physics of the elements, the medicine of humours, the pharmacopoeia founded on the sympathetic virtues of plants, stones or parts of animals are not recognized as scientific disciplines. Even for other fields, the methods are radically different as we shall see. All the same, every author in this volume agrees that anachronism is a capital sin for historians of science. It is indeed anachronistic that almost all the important literature devoted to the history of Byzantine science (and medieval science in general) is evaluated exclusively from a modern point of view. Therefore, it is hardly relevant to emphasize the deficiencies or the originality of the work of this or that Byzantine scholar, because this judgment is set within a wrong perspective.
The genesis of this book sprung from a desire to bring forth a renewed outlook. The book is composed of a total of 13 chapters. The first two (Tnner’ and ‘Outer’ Knowledge: the Debate between Faith and Reason in Late Antiquity; Science Teaching and Learning Methods in Byzantium) deal with essential points in the understanding of Byzantine science, its methods and its modes of dissemination: the debate between faith and reason in late antiquity and science teaching in Byzantium. The next 10 chapters cover the following areas: logistic, arithmetic, harmonic theory, geometry, metrology, optics, mechanics (chapter 3); theories of vision (chapter 4); meteorology, physics (chapter 5); astronomy, astrology (chapter 6); geography (chapter 7); zoology (chapter 8); botany (chapter 9); human medicine, pharmacy (chapter 10); veterinary medicine (chapter 11); science of warfare (chapter 12).°* The choice to include the twelfth chapter is motivated by the need to move away from “technological studies” when it comes to the science of warfare and focus more on the Byzantine’s theoretical conception of how to wage war, i.e. a rigorous approach to warfare, to make use of their tactical knowledge and technology to the best of their ability. Indeed, the development of military tactics required extensive knowledge in other scientific fields like geometry, as discussed by George Pachymeres (1 5€ yewetpia mpd¢ otpatomedetoeic MOAEwWV, Quadrivium, 1.1, |. 37 ed. Tannery/Stéphanou).®
Among these subjects, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy, were part of the Quadrivium® or tetpaxtds Tov Uabyudtwvs? and as such were taught in school.®® Of course, other scientific disciplines were taught in Byzantium, but probably in a less systematic way at a theoretical level. As rightly pointed out in chapter 2, it is not always easy to reconstruct the history of scientific education.
Finally, chapter 13, entitled The Occult Sciences in Byzantium, focuses on several fields which are part of sympathetic knowledge (divination and magic, astrology, iatromathematica, plants and magic stones, alchemy). The reader will find here some areas already analysed in previous chapters but studied from a different angle. The Stoic philosophers introduced the notion of cosmic sympathy in Hellenistic times. According to them, the whole cosmos was like a living body whose parts could not function independently and where the whole depended upon those parts. A “pneuma,” a mixture of fire and air permeated the whole world as its soul—sustaining everything. Consequently, the notion of sympathy could apply to any close connection between parts of the world as well as between them and the whole world. On this basis, we can understand the connections between Mega-cosmos (celestial sphere, fixed stars and planets) and Micro-cosmos (man) as expressed in Astrology and the Iatromathematica (or Medical astrology). Furthermore, the interconnections of Mega-cosmos with animals, plants and stones/minerals based on special qualities of these species provide the link between them and man.
A man was considered as endowed with reasonable power and psychic qualities that contributed to the structure of his whole social persona. Men’s anxiety for their future, especially fears regarding illness and death, forced them to invent divinatory and magical practices transmitted through the centuries from one generation to another.
Men tried to unite themselves with the cosmos either to receive knowledge or to use cosmic forces both in Magic and Divination. Men used their mental and psychic powers to grasp the meaning of omens or other special divinatory signs and explain them. Consequently, divinatory and magical practices are possessed of a strong psychological power that is present but cannot be measured. But is Psychology a science? Psychological phenomena (fear, anger, love, hate and other) cannot be measured in themselves; only their effects on human physiology can be measured. If we consider Psychology to be a science today, we should accept Divination and Magic as sciences of the remote past.®
Do the different chapters presented here cover all the areas that the Byzantines considered to be scientific? To offer an answer encompassing the entire duration of the Byzantine civilization (4th-15th C.) is almost impossible. For example, did Theodore Meliteniotes consider astrology to be a serious field and fit to be part of the sciences? Most likely not. On the other hand, at other times and for other scholars, astrology was without a doubt part of the scientific domain. Apart from this difficulty, it should be noted that there were no standards in Byzantium for clearly defining scientific fields.
We cannot rely on the Quadrivium to distinguish what was or was not scientific. Otherwise what should we do with medicine (human and veterinary), pharmacy, zoology or geography for example? The answer to this question is perhaps to be found in the recognition by Byzantine society (and therefore the social place) of their representatives. However this line of thought is also difficult to exploit because of the limited information that is available to us.”°
The present volume is intended to be a synthesis of the main, if not the only, Byzantine scientific domains and despite the presentation of often unpublished documents, it addresses a wide academic audience. Any synthesis implies a preliminary selection. It is obvious, for example, that a history of science cannot aim to account for all the technical details that a scientist might need to satisfy very specific requirements. The result would be incomprehensible. Also, alongside the general history of science, there will always be room for more detailed historical cases, focussing on a further study of an offshoot of scientific thought. The collective work that was carried out to produce this book led to a first international symposium on the development of scientific knowledge in Byzantium, which took place in Paris (19-20 Oct. 2018). Our combined effort has led to creating an international research network. Its aim is to offer new perspectives and to formulate, through the study of Byzantine science, a Byzantine turn.
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