grandfather, were both distinguished members of the family of Ibn Rosht, and had occupied important and honourable positions in the State.

A student from his earliest childhood, of theology, of law, of medicine, of philosophy, Ibn Rosht-the Grandson, as he is styled in Arabian literature, has left but the scantiest records of his way of life. He was commissioned before he was thirty years of age by the celebrated Ibn Tufail to undertake the establishment of certain colleges in Africa, where he probably passed a considerable time. Ten years later we find him occupying the position of Cadi of Seville; and he was afterwards appointed Chief Cadi of Cordova, an office which had been worthily filled by his father and his grandfather.

Meanwhile his writings had already begun to excite attention. He was accused of theological heterodoxy; and after a solemn inquisition, undertaken by orders of Almanzor, his heretical doctrines were condemned, and his books were publicly burnt at Cordova, while their author suffered the minor penalty of banishment from the court and from the city. But his exile was of no very long duration. The favour and the disfavour of the Berber Princes were alike uncertain, and he was permitted to return to Cordova by the generous Almanzor,1 ere he passed of his own free will into Africa, and died at Morocco in December, 1198.

It is a small record of a great life. But Ibn Rosht enjoyed little reputation among his Arab contemporaries, save as a physician. He founded no school in Islam. His philosophical successors in the east are not Moslems, but the Jewish disciples of Moses Maimonides. His fame is due entirely to the Christian doctors, who admired, misunderstood, discussed,2 and quarrelled over his commentaries. And thus the great Moslem whose translations and speculations were as the seed whose fruit was the reformation of Christendom, was almost without influence in Islam; the great Spaniard was nowhere less honoured than in Spain. The light shone out of Cordova; and Cordova was soon afterwards enveloped in the blackness of darkest night.3

1 Dozy, pp. 224-5. The sovereign was, of course, the Almohade Almanzor -Jacub ben Yusuf (1186-1197).

2 The celebrity at Cordova of the father and grandfather of Averroës, as well as the comparatively small honour in which the philosophical prophet was held in his own country-Renan, Averroës, &c, p. 37-has led to the curious freak of nomenclature by which the most widely celebrated of all the philosophers of Islam was known to his Moslem contemporaries only by his modest family sobriquet of "the grandson" (el Háfid).

3 The great struggle between Mohammedan learning and morals, and Italian ignorance and crime, may be said to have commenced on the return of Gerbert, afterwards Pope Sylvester II., from Cordova, at the close of the tenth century. Draper, op. cit., vol. ii., pp. 5-7.

It is sufficiently remarkable that Averroes, the translator and preserver of Aristotle, was not even acquainted with the language of the original, and that the Latin translation of his Arabic version which served the Christian doctors of the twelfth century was the translation of his translation of a Hebrew translation of a Commentary on an Arab translation of a Syriac1 translation of the original Greek text! But although Ibn Rosht was ignorant of Greek, and although he was far from being the first translator of Aristotle, he had so great an appreciation of the works of the Stagyrite, that to him is certainly due the credit of introducing the Greek philosopher to western Europe. His own views no doubt were largely affected by the neoplatonism of the Alexandrian School; yet Aristotle was his master, his model, the inspirer of all his works. Even in his medical writings, more celebrated by far among his contemporaries than his philosophical commentaries, Averroes is ever the champion of Aristotle against the more popular theories of Galen, especially in what is probably his first work, the celebrated treatise on medical science, which was entitled Kalliyath or General Survey, written about the year 1162, and translated into Latin under the canting title of Colliget, and was repeatedly printed in Europe. His abridgement of the Almegist or Meyán Zúvraģis of Ptolemy, preceded by nearly half a century the earliest Latin translation of that work, which was made by the order of the Emperor Frederic II.

The total number of his works that can now be identified is sixty-seven; but the destruction of Arabic MSS. by Ximenez after the fall of Granada has rendered copies of the original works of Averroes, as of every other Spanish Moslem writer, of extreme rarity.

The first printed edition of any of the works of Averroës in the original was that by Müller, published at Munich in 1859, containing three treatises on religious and philosophical questions.3 But the Latin editions may be counted by hundreds; more than fifty having appeared at Venice alone; and Padua, as may be supposed, lags not far behind her great neighbour. The philosophical writings may be roughly divided into three classes:-The Greater Commentaries, The Minor Commentaries, and the Paraphrases or Analyses; yet they

1 Renan, op. cit., p. 52.

2 Renan devotes many erudite pages (op. cit., pp. 58-79) to an enumeration of the works of Averroes, which include, beyond the Aristotelian commentaries and translations, original treatises on philosophical and theological and physical subjects, especially on medicine, astronomy, and even on grammar and jurisprudence.

3 Renan, p. 85.

are all of them presentments of the views of Aristotle and of the acknowledged writings of the Greek master, only the Politics and the History of Animals remain untranslated by his Moslem disciple. To an Englishman, Michael Scot, who resided and studied at Toledo in the early days of the thirteenth century, is due the honour of first introducing the works of Averroes to the scholars of Christian Europe.2 William of Auvergne, in the thirteenth century, was the first of the schoolmen to criticise his doctrines, and Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas Aquinas devoted special treatises to his the ories. At Oxford, Averroes was soonread and admired, and already, in the days of Roger Bacon, at the end of the thirteenth century, he had become so great an authority in England, that the great Franciscan advised his disciples to acquire so strange and difficult a language as the Arabic for the special purpose of studying the works of the great Commentator in the original. Duns Scotus, John of Baconthorpe, and Walter Burley, were all among his admirers and disciples in England. But it was chiefly in the universities of northern Italy, and more especially at Padua, that the works of Averroes were most ardently studied, and that their influence was most chiefly felt, although the Italian students were led by their new enthusiasm into philosophical excesses which the great Cordovan would have been the first to condemn and to deplore.

Before the end of the fourteenth century, Averroism had incurred the deadly hatred of the Church, and the followers of the Spanish Dominic distinguished themselves among all other Christian orders by their attacks upon the studies and students of the Spanish philosopher. And with the view of horrifying the faithful at his philosophy in general, the famous speech was invented for him by some fourteenth century churchman that "Moses, Christ, and Mahomet were the three great Impostors who had deluded the human race.”

Strangely enough this famous phrase de tribus impostoribus, in spite of its inherent absurdity, has been attributed not only to Averroës but to at least a dozen eminent Christian writers, including Milton, Servetus, Rabelais, Macchiavelli, Boccaccio, and the Emperor Frederick II.5 Queen Christina of Sweden caused all the great libraries of Europe to be

1 Renan, p. 62.

2 Renan, pp. 205-208.

3 Greek was, of course, as yet almost unknown in England, or, indeed, in any part of western Europe.

According to Mr. Lea, Hist. of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages, vol. iii., pp. 565-578, the Inquisitors were somewhat chary of interfering with the speculations of the school of Averroës.

5 See Menendez Pelayo, Heterodoxos Españoles, i., pp. 507 and 782.

searched in the seventeenth century for any authentic record of the phrase, its authorship, or its origin; but the researches were conducted in vain.

In spite of the enormous influence that is attributable to the publications of Averroes, and the philosophical revolution that was brought about by the study of his works, it cannot be said that there was much originality in the philosophy of Arab Spain. Nor was Ibn Rosht more original, though he was possibly more daring than his predecessors. It is by a freak of fortune that his commentaries on the works of his Greek master were taken by an ignorant and uncritical age for masterpieces of original thought, and were themselves the subject of commentaries, discussions, and disputations, as foreign to the Arab as to the Greek philosophy. Disregarded in the language in which they were written, and by the people to whom they were addressed, the works of Ibn Rosht, the Grandson, found a wider field than that of the Peninsula. It was upon European Christendom, yet slumbering, in the twelfth century, that the light of reason "flashed forth from Cordova,"2 and the form of Averroës began to assume those giant proportions which, at a later period, overshadowed the whole intellect of Europe."

2

1 Renan, 88-90.

Lecky, Rationalism in Europe, vol. i., p. 48.

3 See in addition to Renan, Averroes est l'Averroisme, so often referred to; Mehren, Etudes sur la Philosophie d'Averroes, (Louvain, 1888); and Lea, Hist. of the Inquisition, vol. iii.

CHAPTER XX.

THE RISE OF ARAGON.

(1027-1213)

I.-The Inheritance of Ramiro.

ARAGON, in the days of Sancho the Great, was but a small tract of country on the southern slopes of the Pyrenees lying to the west of the little river which gives its name to the modern province, as it did to the medieval kingdom of Aragon. The eastern portion of the old territory of the Vascones, it was but a poor mountainous district of some twenty-four leagues in length by ten or twelve in breadth, without a single town of importance within its boundaries.

Ramiro, who succeeded, as we have seen, on the death of Sancho the Great, to this slender inheritance, is usually reckoned as the first independent King of Aragon; and by his fortunate forays and bold encroachments upon the territories of his neighbour, Christians and Moslem, he increased both the area and the importance of his little kingdom. His son Sancho was no less enterprising and no less fortunate; and at the time of his death in battle2 in 1094, he had extended his dominions as far as the Ebro; and had even threatened the important town of Huesca, which within two years, was captured by his eldest son and successor Peter. This Peter the First of Aragon died after an uneventful reign in 1104, and was succeeded by his younger brother, Alfonso, who married Urraca, Queen of Castile and Leon, widow of Raymond of Burgundy, and who may be distinguished by his appropriate title of El Batallador.

1 For an exhaustive treatise on the history and geography of the north-eastern districts of Spain at this time, see D. José Pella y Forgas, Historia de Ampurdán (Barcelona, 1883), with an excellent map, and many ilustrations.

Gerona is partly in this district; Figueras entirely so; and Tossa on the coast is the most southerly village.

2 At this most important batile, St. George is said to have appeared at the head of the Christian chivalry, and his cross was adopted as the arms of Aragon, on a field Argent, with four bloody heads of Moorish chiefs in the four cantons. See APPENDIX V., St. George.

After the taking of Huesca, the Aragonese assisted the Cid in his expedition against Valencia.

3 She was the eldest daughter of Alfonso VI. of Castile and Leon, who died without male issue in 1109. See ante, chapter xvii.