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The Muslims of medieval Italy
at Bari, Salerno and Naples, it is also notable how many of the translated Arabic texts in Sicily – al-ÍËfÈ, Dioscurides, KalÈla wa-Dimna, Manfred’s additions to The Art of Hunting with Birds – contained miniature pictures, not as gratuitous embellishments, but as a visual clarification of the text, stylistically indebted to illustrated Arabic books of the tenth century, and forming key links between artistic and scientific depiction.5 The south Italian mainland had its own scholarly tradition which was partly connected to Arabic science and perhaps best epitomised by Constantine ‘the African’, a Christian translator of Latin texts into Arabic. Constantine hailed from Carthage and was associated with both the early medical school at Salerno and the abbey at Montecassino, where he died as a monk in 1085. Among the many works attributed to him was the medical compendium, the Liber Pantegni, which transmitted knowledge of Arab-Muslim and Greek medical science into Europe. The work was continued and later extended by his bilingual pupils until a new translation was made by Stephen of Pisa with trilingual reference terms in Latin, Greek and Arabic. By Stephen’s day in the 1120s, it is possible to see how the political and commercial development of the southern Mediterranean had created academic matrices across which scholars might work and travel. In so doing, they were well-positioned to construct the essential academic apparatus for further study to take place. Stephen, for example, claimed that Arabic- and Greek-speaking scholars could be consulted with ease in Sicily and Salerno, but was himself working mainly in George of Antioch’s native city which had developed as an academic centre, had a thriving Pisan quarter and whose prince, Bohemond II, was Robert Guiscard’s grandson. Composed with a similar, and by no means, unusual methodology, was IdrÈsÈ’s multilingual compendium on ‘simple’ drugs in which synonyms were recorded across several languages. It is not known for certain that it was composed in Sicily, but it was influential in its day and was frequently cited by the famous botanist Ibn al-Bay†År (d. 1248) of Andalusi origin, who had produced, inter alia, a commentary on Dioscurides, which itself included multilingual vocabularies – in his case, with equivalent terms in Arabic, Berber and Latin.6 Indeed, the widespread scientific plurilingualism of the south Mediterranean offers a number of thought-provoking contexts for the development of the lingua franca of governance, diplomacy and politics of the 1100s. It is not coincidental that this same period witnessed increased rigour and regulation of medical practitioners via systems of approbation, validation and registration, fostering a sense of ‘professionalism’, arguably one of the earliest of its type in Europe. The convergence of shared intellectual interests in two main centres within the kingdom, which enhanced the development of both through a long period of academic study and exchange, is shown by the links between the medical