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  In 1535–7 Postel accompanied the French ambassador sent by François I to Suleiman the Magnificent in Constantinople, where Postel’s commission was to collect Oriental manuscripts for the French king. At the same time, Postel studied Arabic and Turkish. In Istanbul he learnt Arabic so fast that his teacher thought that he might be a demon. He also managed to pick up colloquial Greek, and Armenian. (He later boasted that he would be able to travel as far as the frontier of China without experiencing any language problems.) He studied Arabic primarily in order to improve his knowledge of Hebrew, for the two Semitic languages had many grammatical features and items of vocabulary in common. But Arabic was also useful for study of the doctrines of the Eastern Christians. In 1539 he became holder of the first chair of Arabic in Paris – at the Collège de France. (The Collège de France was a humanist institute of higher learning founded by François I in 1530.) Around 1538–43 Postel, drawing heavily on medieval Arabgrammars, wrote and published Grammatica Arabica, the first ever grammar of classical Arabic in Europe. Although it was not a particularly accurate one, it would remain the basic textbook until Erpenius, drawing on and improving Postel’s work, published his Arabic grammar in 1613. After Postel undertook another eastern trip, this time to the Holy Land in 1549, a slightly puzzling story circulated that his beard had been grey when he set out for the East and black when he returned. There were also rumours that this amazingly learned and mysterious figure possessed the elixir of life. As a result of his trips to the Near East, he was able to publish De la république des Turcs, et là ou ‘l’occasion s’offera, des meurs et loys de tous Muhamedistes (1559), which was followed by two companion volumes with even more verbose titles. These books introduced French readers to the life of the Prophet, the history of Islam, the Arabic langauge, as well as the religion, laws, customs of the Ottoman Turks.

  In his lifetime he was the foremost expert on Arabic and Islam in Europe, but he was also quite barmy. In Venice in 1547 he had met up with a woman called Johanna, whom he confidently identified with the Shekinah (divine presence) of the Cabala, the Angelic Pope, the Mater Mundi, the New Eve, and the consummation of eternity, among other things. Johanna (like Superman) had X-ray vision, so that she could see Satan sitting at the centre of the earth. Postel, impressed, became her disciple. By the time he returned from his second trip to the Middle East, the Mater Mundi was dead. However, this was only a temporary setback, as in 1551 she returned to this world and possessed Postel’s body, so that he became the Mater Mundi, the New Eve and so on. (He does not say if he got the X-ray vision.) As prophet of the New Age, he then produced a succession of strange books and pamphlets, which got him into trouble with the Inquisition in Venice. However, the Inquisition, in an unusually benign frame of mind, decreed that he was not a heretic, merely insane. An official of the Holy Office, who had examined Postel’s writings for heresy in 1555, reported that, though his ideas were definitely heretical, ‘no one, fortunately, could possibly understand them except the author’. Postel was imprisoned in Italy from 1555 until 1559 and then again detained as a lunatic in St Martin des Champs in Paris from 1563. The latter term of incarceration was more in the way of a comfortable and honourable medical house arrest, as his erudition, as well as his amiable personality, continued to command enormous respect until his death in 1581.

  Postel’s erudition drew heavily on the Cabala and Neoplatonism, but also on what he could discover of the doctrines of such Muslim groups as the Druze and the Isma‘ilis. In particular, his notion of the successive incarnation of the Divine in men (and he considered himself an outstanding example) may have ultimately been derived from his reading of Druze literature. He was especially enthusiastic about the Druze because he had determined that they were of French origin and that their name derived from ‘Druid’. The alleged Frenchness of the Druze was particularly important, as Postel was a fervent patriot who believed that the French were the chosen people of the Last Days and that the King of France had the rightful claim to be king of the world by virtue of his direct descent from Noah (though one would have thought that there were many in Postel’s time who could have made a similar claim).

  Doubtless there were many sixteenth-century Frenchmen who believed that they belonged to the chosen race. But Postel had plenty of other more unusual ideas – such as his belief in the superiority of women. And to stick with Oriental issues, he argued that Muhammad was a genuine Prophet and that Muslims should be considered as half Christians. Furthermore, his De la république des Turcs et là ou ‘l’occasion s’offera, des meurs et loys de tous Muhamedistes offered an unusually favourable account of Muslim manners and customs. While not wholly uncritical of the way of life of the Turks, he thought that they were better than Christians in the way that they arranged marriages and divorces, in their charity, in their provision for education and in the decorous quiet of their prayers. He admired and praised the Ottoman sultan’s palace-harem, the Seraglio (and he was by no means the only European visitor to Istanbul to do so). He maintained that almost everything in Asia was superior to almost everything in Christendom: ‘All things that we hold in the West as of extraordinary artifice are like mere shadows of oriental excellencies.’ The East as a whole was superior to the West, because the earthly paradise had been located there. He cited supporting evidence for Eastern excellence, such as borametz, an oriental bush which bore lambs as its fruit, or another oriental tree which produced bread, wine, silk, vinegar and oil. (Pico della Mirandola had entertained vaguely similar notions about the Orient, for he believed that the sun was stronger in the eastern part of the world, where it produced gems, perfumes, lions, tigers and elephants.) Another proof provided by Postel for the superiority of the East was that the Three Wise Men came from there. As late as the eighteenth century, leading thinkers in the European Enlightenment looked for stimulus to Oriental sages – not just to Buddha and Confucius, but also to Near Eastern figures such as the ancient Arabian sage Luqman, the Aesop of the Arabs.

  Postel also held the East to be superior in its arts and manufactures. While few of his contemporaries would have gone along with Postel on the superiority of women, still less the X-ray vision of the incarnation of the Shekinah living in Venice, nevertheless his views of the Orient were quite widely shared in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The French jeweller Jean Chardin (1643–1713) conducted a careful survey of Safavid Persia’s various crafts and industries, at the end of which he concluded that in a majority, though by no means all, Persia was more advanced than Western Europe. Others feared Ottoman military superiority, for it was only towards the end of the seventeenth century that the military tide could be seen to have turned.

  Postel found much to admire in both Ottoman and Arabic culture, but his study of Islam was essentially driven by fear. Until late in the seventeenth century, Ottoman Turkish advances in the Balkans seemed to threaten the very survival of Christendom. He fearfully perceived that Islam already prevailed in ten twelfths of the known world. At the same time the rise of Protestantism presented a corresponding danger within Christendom’s frontiers. He was convinced that Islam and Protestantism were dangerously alike and he wrote a treatise on the equivalence of these threats, Alcorani seu legis Mahometi et Evangelistum concordiae liber (Paris, 1543). Protestant reformers were, like Muhammad before them, sowers of schism. ‘The spiritual sons of Luther are the little bastards of Mahom’, as he put it. Postel also held the common view that Islam had been sent as a scourge of the Oriental Christians because of their divisions and contumaciousness. He wanted to find and publish the texts of Eastern Christians in order to expose their errors. Having come across a bogus Hadith, or saying, attributed to the Prophet Muhammad (in this case falsely), to the effect that the translation of the Qur’an into other languages would be the doom of the Muslims, Postel had no hesitation in translating large chunks of it into Latin in De Orbis Concordia Libri Quatuor (1544). As well as a translation of parts of the Qur’an, Postel’s book also gave an account of the life
of the Prophet, as well as attacks on both the Qur’an and the Prophet. Yet, despite his hostility to the Prophet’s revelation, he did not write of him as an impostor. Moreover, as its title suggests, De Orbis Concordia was not so much a work of polemic as the setting out of a programme for universal harmony and the search for a common ground for all faiths, that common ground being a rationally and philosophically explained Catholicism. In the turbulent context of the religious wars of the sixteenth century, his ideas in this area were almost as mad as his notions about the Mater Mundi and the Shekinah.31

  Postel died in 1581. Despite his apparently marginal position as the crazy Cabalist with impractical plans for world peace, he maintained contacts with all the leading Orientalists and Oriental projects. Postel’s pupils included Raphelengius and Joseph Justus Scaliger (on both of whom more shortly). The manuscripts he collected in the East were also important for future scholarly researches. In particular, a manuscript of the fourteenth-century Syrian prince Abu al-Fida’s geography was to be much studied, as it provided a lot of vital information for cartographers about eastern lands.

  THE PRINTED QUR’AN

  Postel had also advised Theodor Bibliander in his work on a printed Latin version of the Qur’an. It is one of the striking paradoxes in the history of Western culture that the invention of printing had at first an archaicizing effect, as neglected medieval texts were given a much wider circulation than they had achieved when they were first written. (The first books that Caxton printed did not deal with new technology or the latest literary fashions, but were mostly medieval chivalric treatises.) Prior to the sixteenth century, very few scholars had had access to the manuscript of Robert of Ketton’s twelfth-century translation of the Qur’an into Latin. However, in 1543 Theodor Bibliander, a Protestant scholar of Jewish exegetical writings, produced an edition of Robert of Ketton’s work, under the title Machumetis Saracenorum principis, eiusque successorum vitae, ac doctrina, ipseque Alcoran, Quo velut authentico legum diuinarum codice Agareni & Turcae… (and so on and so on). Bibliander’s version of the text was to be printed in three further editions in Basel and Zurich in the years that followed. The printed version of Robert of Ketton’s translation was accompanied by medieval attacks on the Prophet and Muslims by Peter the Venerable and others. Despite the anti-Islamic polemical baggage, the man who first printed this version of the Qur’an, Johann Herbst, was imprisoned by the city council of Basel for disseminating pro-Muslim propaganda. It was feared that even the most virtuous or sophisticated reader might be seduced by the heresies of the damnable book.32 As several later printers would discover, anyone who printed the Qur’an ran the risk of being accused of being a crypto-Muslim and therefore sentenced to a term in prison. On the other hand, there was so much interest among the reading public in a book that had such a wicked reputation, that printing a translation of the Qur’an was quite a profitable enterprise.

  Herbst’s imprisonment had been of short duration, for the leader of the Reformation in Germany, Martin Luther (1483–1546), sprang to the defence of Bibliander and his printer. One of the manuscripts Bibliander had used for his edition had been provided by Luther, who also wrote the preface to Bibliander’s second edition which was published in Basle in 1550. When he was younger, Luther had preached that the Turks should not be resisted, as their coming was a punishment for sin. Later, when a Turkish army besieged Vienna in 1529, he changed his mind.33 Even so, he does not seem to have been particularly conscious of the ideological threat posed by Islam, until, late in life, he stumbled across Ricoldo da Monte Croce’s Im probatio al chorani, which so impressed him that he translated it into German in 1542. Although Luther interested himself in the medieval polemics against Islam (and he also wrote a preface to Nicholas of Cusa’s Cribratio Alcoran), he did not in fact believe that it was possible to convert the Muslims, for he held that they had hardened their heart against Christianity and were beyond redemption. On the other hand, a new Crusade against Islam would be useless as long as Christendom was divided and given over to sin. It was even possible that the Turks would triumph over the Christians and, to some extent, he wrote to prepare his readership for that eventuality. But for all Luther’s horrified fascination with Islam, he still regarded the Pope as the real Antichrist, for Luther found the doctrines of Islam to be gross and preposterous by comparison with the sophisticated corruption of Roman Catholicism. Just as the Catholic Postel had conceived of true Christianity as being under assault from the two-pronged menace of Islam and Protestantism, so Luther thought that the menace came from Islam and the Catholic Church. Despite the advances that the Turks were making in the Balkans, Luther was certain that the corruption of the Catholic Church was the greater menace to the true faith. The Antichrist’s head was the Pope, while his body was Islam. This was a period when, if a person thought of defining himself in terms of an ‘Other’, then, if that person was a Protestant, the ‘Other’ was likely to be a Catholic, and vice versa. According to Luther, ‘Turca et Papa in formis religionis nihil different aut variant, nisi in ceremoniis’ (The Turk and the Pope do not differ in the form of their religion, unless it be in the rituals).34

  POLYGLOTS

  There is a certain sort of triumphalist history of European culture that presents the progress of the arts and sciences in terms of smooth, incremental gains. In this progress every grand intellectual endeavour inevitably brings results that benefit the world. But such a selective version of intellectual history neglects the past importance of grand projects, supported by the best minds and often by copious funding that still went nowhere. Cultural history is (or at least should be) full of cul-de-sacs, such as the labours of Joseph Justus Scaliger, James Ussher, Count Jean Potocki and others to establish a universal chronology that would confirm the apparent time-frame set out by the Bible, or the attempts to square the circle, by Nicholas of Cusa and others. The production in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the polyglot Bibles was another great scholarly enterprise that today has been more or less forgotten.

  A polyglot Bible is one in which the text is printed in various languages in parallel columns. The purpose of this was to allow a more accurate reading of the original text and to correct what were possibly misleading renderings in the Latin Vulgate scriptures.35 The earliest polyglot Bibles were essentially Catholic enterprises. The Complutensian Polyglot Bible of 1514–17 was produced in Spain and included texts in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. The Antwerp Polyglot of 1569–72, though it built upon the readings established by the Complutensian Bible, was a more ambitious production and it was more widely distributed. Apart from anything else, the Antwerp Bible was a set-piece display of the state of the printer’s art. Christophe Plantin, a merchant prince of the world of printing and publishing, was also famous for printing in 1570 Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum orbis terrarum, a universal atlas whose publication pushed contemporary printing technology to its limits. The polyglot Bible was hardly less of a technical tour de force. The Vulgate Latin text was laid out in parallel with Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac versions and the exotic typefaces were deployed in a range of sizes. Furthermore, a team of Europe’s leading biblical scholars also provided a vast scholarly apparatus. Although no Arabic text of the Bible was printed, Arabic expertise was required in order to shed light on some of the problems posed by the texts in the other Semitic languages: Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac.36 The scholar who supervised the Antwerp Polyglot Bible project, Benito Arias Montano, was a biblical scholar who had mastered Arabic as well as Hebrew.37 (Arias Montano was the man who thought that America featured in the Old Testament.) It was also inevitable that Postel should be called upon to advise. As has already been mentioned, Postel had also taught Franciscus Raphelengius (1539–97). Nevertheless, the latter, a Paris-educated Fleming who became a proof-reader at the Plantin printing-house, seems to have picked up most of his Arabic by teaching himself as he worked on the polyglot Bible. He is a striking, but by no means untypical, example of a man who acquired a mastery of Ara
bic outside of any academic institution. He later became Professor of Hebrew in Leiden and his distinguished career as a scholar of Hebrew and Arabic, as well as of Latin, Chaldaean, Syriac, Persian and Ethiopian, will be discussed in the next chapter.38

  The Antwerp Polyglot Bible, under the patronage of Philip II of Spain, was a Catholic enterprise (though there were many Catholics who doubted the wisdom of challenging the reliability of St Jerome’s Vulgate), and in the sixteenth century the study of Arabic and Islam was still dominated by Catholic scholarship. For a long time Italian cities, and in particular Rome and Venice, were the leading centres for the study of Islam. The Vatican library was founded in 1475. By 1488 it had twenty-two Arabic manuscripts. In the longer run, this library was the recipient of more manuscripts donated by Oriental Christians. However, until at least the end of the seventeenth century, the study of Arabic outside the great libraries was severely hampered by the sheer difficulty and expense of acquiring Arabic manuscripts, and of getting Arabic manuscripts, with their strangely shaped letters, printed.

  The Papacy sponsored the earliest experiments in printing in Arabic and in 1514 Pope Julius II sponsored Gregorio de’ Gregori’s printing of Kitab salat al-sawa‘i, a book of hours with an Arabic typeface, designed to be used by Eastern Christians. It was the first book ever to be printed in Arabic lettering. This was followed by the Genoese Dominican Agostino Giustiniani’s printing of a polyglot Psalter in 1516, in which the Psalms appeared in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic. Then a Venetian printer, Paganino de Paganini, produced a Qur’an for the use of missionaries in 1537–8. These early printed texts had a limited distribution and an experimental character. The typefaces did not follow the cursive Arabic script closely enough and hence must have seemed unattractive to Arabreaders. Things changed with the establishment of the Medici Oriental Press. This was set up in Rome in 1584 under the direction of Giovan Battista Raimondi and the patronage of Pope Gregory XIII. It was the first printing press in Europe dedicated to printing books in an Arabic typeface and the typeface it used was strikingly elegant. The primary aim in printing books in Arabic was not to assist the academic study of the Arab world nor even to publish polemical works against Islam, but rather to produce Arabic books that could be used in preaching missions to the Oriental Christians (the Copts, Maronites, Nestorians and others), seeking to convert those lost sheep to Catholicism. One of its most important publications was a version of the Gospels in Arabic in 1591. However, the Medici Press also published that standard medical textbook, the Canon of Avicenna, as well as a selection of grammars and works of learning, for European consumption, including al-Idrisi’s twelfth-century geography of the world. It found few takers for what it printed and consequently ran at a substantial loss. After the printing of only seven Arabic texts, the project was abandoned in 1595.39