The New Europeans

Abstract

About the year 1100 a young cleric, Adelard of Bath, left England on a lifetime of study and travel. His goal was the treasury of classical Greek learning, all but lost with the fall of the western Roman Empire in the mid-fifth century, which Islamic scholars working in Bukhara and Cordoba in the ninth and tenth centuries had translated into Arabic. His voyage of discovery took him to Asia Minor, Italy, Sicily and Christian Spain — wherever there was the chance of acquiring new texts or meeting the scholars who were either skilled in Arabic and Greek, the languages which could unlock the desired riches, or who were proficient in the new learning. By 1120 he had learned enough Arabic to make the first Latin translation of the geometrical works of Euclid. Adelard was one of the first of the wandering scholars of the twelfth century whose thirst for knowledge led them to the religious and intellectual frontiers of their time. They travelled to acquire mastery of Latin, the international language of law, learning and administration; they sought the powerful methods of argumentation contained in Aristotle’s logic; and they sought the advanced principles of law and jurisprudence contained in the classical law of the Roman Empire and in the emerging law of the Western Church. In short, they travelled to acquire the knowledge which would fit them for office in the church or service in the rapidly expanding bureaucracy of the state.