The story of Constantine the African It is one of those that give for a juicy novel or an exciting movie. A Muslim converted to Christianity, he traveled throughout most of the Near and Near East learning medicine and translating Arabic and Greek books on the subject into Latin, ending up as a monk in Italy. A life that combined adventure, religion and knowledge.
It is not known in what year he was born, calculating around 1020, nor the exact place, perhaps Carthage, perhaps Sicily, although his family was of Punic descent. In any case, both one site and the other were, at that time, territory under Arab rule and, therefore, the faith he professed was Muslim.
Peter the Deacon , a Benedictine monk who wrote several historical works and lived a few years after his death, defined him with the term "Saracen", a typically medieval word applied to North African Muslims.
And it is that Constantine spent the first part of his life in North Africa. Of course, he then embarked on a very long journey that took him to places like Egypt, Syria, Ethiopia, Persia and India. He lived for many years in Babylon and that multicultural touch allowed him to soak up science and culture. According to one of his 19th-century biographers, Joseph-François Malgaigne, he "learned grammar, logic, physics, geometry, arithmetic, mathematics, astronomy, necromancy, and music" , although he took a special interest in medicine, which he studied primarily in Baghdad and on which he also compiled a considerable collection of various books and texts. He was around forty years old when he decided to return to Carthage but before he stopped in Italy.
This is what most biographers say, such as the physicist and writer Salvatore de Renzi or the French librarian specializing in the history of medicine, Charles Daremberg. Both wrote his works in the 19th century, although it must be taken into account that they used the aforementioned Pedro the Deacon as their exclusive source. and there remains some doubt about how much hagiography there is. Something similar can be said of the review made by the French military doctor Lucien Leclerc in his Histoire de la médecine arabe . It was not until 1865 that another medical historian, the German Karl Sudhoff, found other documents on the character and published a novel thesis on the matter.
What is more certain is that Constantine chose Sicily, perhaps because he knew it if he was really born there and where, in fact, he was known as Constantine Siculus. He had no language problems and lived mainly in neighboring Salerno, a city with which he would have close ties, as we will see. There he met a doctor named Abbas de Curiat, from a small island off Mahdia (a coastal city in present-day Tunisia), who hired him as an interpreter.
Together with him, he confirmed that Muslim medicine was one step above European medicine when he fell ill and the treatment prescribed by his friend was much better than that prescribed by a Christian doctor. Interested in the subject, Constantine consulted medical treatises, finding that none of them reached the appropriate quality.
But those studies on his own served for one thing:to awaken in him his vocation for health. So, he went to Carthage and there he practiced the profession for three years, relying solely on the knowledge he acquired from reading multiple books.
An obscure denunciation for practicing witchcraft forced him to leave and he chose Salerno again, although some sources indicate that he was previously in the service of the Byzantine Emperor Constantine Monomachus, without further details. It is evident that there was a fluid commercial relationship between North Africa and the Christian enclaves in the southern part of the Italian Peninsula. Products such as olive oil, wax, leather, wool, wheat and many more circulated without the different professed religions being an obstacle, so that many Muslim merchants had bases on European soil such as Taranto, Bari, Agripolis or Gaglione. Furthermore, the doors to learning were open, whatever the origin.
It is possible that this prompted Constantine to set foot in Italy again. He also the one who had a good relationship with the Norman duke Robert Guiscard, son of William the Conqueror , who had just seized the region from the Muslims. The fact is that during the trip he experienced what at first seemed like a bad move of fate but later turned out to be the opposite:he was sailing along the coast of Lucania when a storm caused him to lose a large part of his valued bibliographical collection, including some volumes of the Kitāb Kāmil aṣ-Ṣināʿa aṭ-Ṭibbiyya or Complete book of the art of medicine , the most important work of the time on the subject, written in a dozen treatises by the Persian physician 'Ali ibn al-'Abbas al-Majusi, better known as Masoud or Haly Abbas. It was a huge loss because those books formed the theoretical basis on which Constantine carried out his work.
As if it were a revelation, he decided to adopt the Christian faith, whether voluntarily or forced is unknown. In Salerno he knocked again on the doors of an institution where he had attended some classes during his previous stay:the famous Salernitana Medical School. The forerunner of universities, it was created in the 9th century from an old hospital founded by Benedictine monks some two hundred years earlier and, within a century, had achieved international prestige. Four famous doctors passed through its classrooms:the Jew Helinus, the Greek Pontus, the Arab Adela and the Italian Salermo, making clear its character as an intercultural melting pot.
The school had secular education as its main and rare characteristic. The students learned the techniques of classics such as Hippocrates, Galen and Dioscorides, to which in the 10th century texts by Averroes, Avicenna, Rhazes, Al Jazzar or the Jewish Isaac of Toledo were added, for which he earned the nickname of Hippocratica Civitas . It was, therefore, the appropriate place for Constantine, who took the opportunity to also recover his experience as an interpreter to translate into Latin the Arabic and Greek manuscripts that he had been collecting, a task that he combined with the job of professor and that led him to be appointed Magister orientis et occidentis . He is iconographically associated with a glass of urine because he used to analyze that liquid for diagnoses.
Authors such as Ibn Al-Gazzar (Viaticum ), Johannitius (Isagoge ), Hippocrates (Aphorisma, Prognostica ), Galen (Tegni, Megategni ), Philaretto (De Pulsibus ), Rhazes (Liber divisionum, Liber experimentarum ) or Isaac of Toledo (Liber dietorum, Liber urinarium, Liber febrium ), among others, were better known and consulted thanks to him until the 17th century, although they were fairly free translations; Not only that, but he incorporated his contributions and suppressed references to the originals, passing off the works as his own.
He was also the one who translated the treatises of Isaac Israeli ben Solomon, the Jew who was considered the best doctor of the Fatimid Caliphate (the one that ruled North Africa) and the one who, in the year 1087, passed the aforementioned into Latin. Kitāb Kāmil aṣ-Ṣināʿa aṭ-Ṭibiyya renaming it as Liber Pantegni and, of course, without citing its actual author, Haly Abbas.
In essence, it can be said that he plagiarized, although expanding the originals of his harvest and respecting the doctrinal background. Despite everything, Constantine was the one who opened Western medicine to Muslim, Jewish and Greek authors, thus promoting a giant step forward in that science.
Later the African he was hired as a secretary by the aforementioned Guiscard, grateful for the cure of a poisoned arrow he received in Palestine, but later he left the court, took the habit and joined the Benedictines, spending the last years of his life translating books in the Abbey of Montecassino, the first monastery founded by Benedict of Nursia -the creator of the order that bears his name- back in 529 and which became very popular due to the battle that was fought among its ruins during the Second World War. There he died, on an indeterminate date in the last quarter of the 11th century (1087? 1098?).