Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

122 • The Making of Islamic Sciencescience in Europe. Both of these perceptions are erroneous; both aregeneralizations that have found their way into secondary literatureand are repeated ad nauseam; both are exaggerations withouthistorical foundation. Another common misconception arises fromcomparisons between the translation of Islamic scientific texts intoLatin and the translation movement into Arabic. These comparisonsare at best superficial, as will become clear from the followingaccount. The two events are of a different order of magnitude, tookplace under very different conditions, and yielded very differentconsequences.The movement that brought Islamic scientific and philosophicalthought to the Latin West can be divided into three phases. The firstof these three began in the late tenth century as a result of small andindividual efforts. The individual most responsible for supportingand spreading this activity was a man born of poor parents in ornear the village of Aurillac in south-central France: Gerbert ofAurillac (ca. 946–1003). Gerbert, who would rise to the Papacy in 999as Pope Sylvester II (999–1003), received a thorough education inLatin grammar at the monastery of St. Gerard in Aurillac, where heremained until 967.In that year, Borrell II, the count of Barcelona, visited themonastery and was so impressed by Gerbert that he requestedthe abbot to allow Gerbert to come to Catalan Spain for furthereducation. In Spain, Gerbert was entrusted to Atto, the bishopof Vich. It was here that Gerbert first came into contact witha mathematics far superior to anything he had learned so far.Fascinated by the Islamic mathematical tradition and Arabicnumerals, he quickly learned the use of an abacus, which he laterintroduced to Latin Europe outside Spain (Lattin 1961, 6).Gerbert’s interest in Islamic scientific manuscripts was sustainedover a long period of time, but what is more important for our bookis the information we find in his letters about the earliest period oftranslation activity from Arabic into Latin. For instance, on March25, 984, he wrote a letter to Seniofred of Barcelona (d. ca. 995), theprominent and wealthy archdeacon of the cathedral of Barcelona(also known by his nickname Lupitus or Lubetus (Lobet), in whichhe asked him to send him De Astrologia, his translation of an Arabic