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Brass astrolabe, probably from Spain
AD 1345–1355
This is a portable model of the heavens, in the shape of an exquisite, circular brass instrument, which looks a bit like a large brass pocket watch. It’s an astrolabe, and with it in my hands I can tell the time, do some surveying, or work out my position in the world by sun or stars and, if I have enough information, cast your horoscope.
Although familiar to ancient Greeks, the astrolabe was an instrument that was particularly important for the Islamic world, as it allowed the faithful to find the direction of Mecca, so it is not surprising that the oldest astrolabe to survive is an Islamic one from the tenth century. But the astrolabe pictured here is a Jewish one made about 650 years ago in Spain. It is inscribed with Hebrew lettering, but it also contains Arabic and Spanish words, and it combines both Islamic and European decorative elements. It is not just an advanced scientific instrument, but also an emblem of a very particular moment in Europe’s religious and political history.
We don’t know exactly who owned this particular Hebrew astrolabe, but it tells us a great deal about how Jewish and Islamic scholars revitalized science and astronomy by developing the inheritance of Classical Greece and Rome. The instrument speaks of a great intellectual synthesis, and about a time when the three religions – Christianity, Judaism and Islam – coexisted peacefully. There was no religious synthesis, but the three faiths lived together in fruitful friction, and between them they made medieval Spain the intellectual powerhouse of Europe.
An astrolabe makes accessible in compact form the sum total of medieval astronomical lore. Like the latest developments today, this was must-have technology, a demonstration that you were right at the cutting edge. There is a wonderfully funny and touching letter written by Chaucer to his ten-year-old son Lewis, who was obviously like techie boys in every generation and clamouring to get to grips with an astrolabe. As well as writing him a letter, Chaucer also wrote him a little instruction manual, telling the boy how to use the instrument and warning him just how difficult he was going to find it – although I suspect that, like most children today, Lewis quickly left his father behind.
Little Lewis, I have perceived well thy ability to learn sciences touching numbers and proportions; and I have also considered thy earnest prayer specially to learn the Treatise of the Astrolabe. Here is an Astrolabe of our horizon and a little treatise to teach a certain number of conclusions appertaining to the same instrument.
Trust well that all the conclusions that can be found, or else possibly might be found in so noble an instrument as an Astrolabe, are not perfectly understood by any mortal man in this region, and I have seen that there be some instructions that will not in all things deliver their intended results; and some of them be too hard for thy tender age of ten years to understand …
At first sight this astrolabe looks like an outsized old-fashioned pocket watch with an entirely brass face. It is a gleaming assemblage of interlocking brasswork, with five wafer-thin discs, one on top of another, held together by a central pin. On top of this are several pointers that can be lined up with various symbols on the discs to give you astronomical readings or help you to determine your position. An astrolabe like this one is designed for the particular latitude in which it is going to be used – the five discs here will allow you to get an accurate reading from any position between the latitudes of the Pyrenees and North Africa. In the middle of that range are the latitudes for the Spanish cities of Seville and Toledo.
This tells us that this astrolabe was almost certainly made for somebody based in Spain, who might travel between North Africa and France, and the writing on the astrolabe tells us clearly what kind of person must have been using it. The owner is Jewish and is learned.
Dr Silke Ackermann, the curator of scientific instruments here at the British Museum, has spent a lot of time studying this astrolabe:
The inscriptions are all in Hebrew – you can see the finely engraved Hebrew letters quite clearly. But what’s so intriguing about the piece is that not all the words are Hebrew. Some of them have Arabic origins and some are medieval Spanish. So, for example, beside a star in the constellation that we call Aquila – the eagle – we can see written in Hebrew nesher me’offel – ‘the flying eagle’. But other star names are given in their Arabic form: so Aldabaran in Taurus has its Arabic name al-dabaran written in Hebrew letters. And when you read out the Hebrew letters for the names of the months, they give you the medieval Spanish names like October, November, December. So what you have here is the knowledge of the Classical Greek astronomers who charted the heavens, combined with the contributions of Muslim, Jewish and Christian scholars – and all in the palm of your hand.
The Spain in which this astrolabe was made was the only place in Christian-ruled Europe where there were significant populations of Muslims; it was also home to an extensive Jewish population. From the eighth to the fifteenth centuries, the mixing in medieval Spain of the people of these three religions was one of Spanish society’s most distinctive elements. Of course, there was no such country as Spain yet – in the fourteenth century it was still a patchwork of states. The biggest was Castile, which shared a border with the last independent Muslim state in the peninsula, the kingdom of Granada. In many parts of Christian Spain there were large numbers of Jews and Muslims, all three groups living together but keeping their separate traditions, in what might be described as an early example of multiculturalism. This coexistence, extremely rare in this period of European history, is often referred to by the Spanish term convivencia.
The distinguished historian of Spain Professor Sir John Elliott explains how this mixed society emerged:
As I see it, the essence of multiculturalism is the preservation of the distinctive identity of the different religious and ethnic communities in a society. And for much of the period of Islamic rule, the policy of the rulers was to accept that diversity, even if it regarded Christians and Jews as adherents of inferior faiths. When the Christian rulers took over they did much the same, because they had no other option, really, though at the same time, of course, intermarriage was forbidden within these communities, so it was a limited multiculturalism. That didn’t prevent a great deal of mutual interaction, particularly at the cultural level. So the result was a civilization which was vibrant and creative and original because of this contact between the three races.
A couple of centuries earlier this mutual interaction had put medieval Spain at the forefront of the expansion of knowledge in Europe. Not only was there growing scientific knowledge around astronomical instruments like our astrolabe, but it was also in Spain that the works of the ancient Greek philosophers, above all Aristotle, were translated into Latin and entered the intellectual bloodstream of medieval Europe. This pioneering work depended on constant interchange between Muslim, Jewish and Christian scholars, and by the fourteenth century, this scholarly legacy was embedded in European thought – in science and medicine as well as philosophy and theology. The astrolabe became the indispensable tool of astronomers, astrologers, doctors, geographers or indeed anyone with intellectual aspirations – even a ten-year-old English boy like Chaucer’s son. Eventually, this one intricate object that could do so many things would be displaced by a whole range of separate instruments – the globe, the printed map, the sextant, the chronometer and the compass, each doing one of the numerous jobs the astrolabe could do on its own.
The shared inheritance of Islamic, Christian and Jewish thinkers would survive for centuries, but the convivencia of the three faiths did not. Although medieval Spain is today often hailed by politicians as a beacon of tolerance and the model for multi-faith coexistence, the historical truth is distinctly less comfortable. This is Sir John Elliott again:
As regards actual religious tolerance, it’s rather less clear-cut than coexistence … Christendom in general was a pretty intolerant society, very opposed to deviants of all kinds, and that intolerance was particularly directed against the Jews. For instance, England expelled its Jews in 1290, and France more than a decade later, and as far as Christian–Muslim relations were concerned there was a hardening of religious attitudes from the twelfth century onwards. As the Christians preached the Crusades, and the Almohads who moved into Spain from North Africa preached the Jihad, there was an increasing aggressiveness on both sides.
Against this background, Christian Spain could still seem comparatively tolerant. But there were already signs of trouble, and the survival of Muslim Granada was a reminder of unfinished business. The intellectual alliance of Christians, Jews and Muslims would soon be swept away by a militant Spanish monarchy, intent on following the rest of Europe and asserting Christian dominance. In the years around 1500, Jews and Muslims would be persecuted and expelled from Spain. The convivencia was over.