50 January 2003 Sky & Telescope 2002 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Alexandria, Egypt, Second Century A.D.

An unprecedented community of poets, philosophers,
scientists, and other scholars has contributed to one of
the greatest libraries ever built by humankind. Amid this
fervent intellectual backdrop, classical astronomy has
reached its zenith in the writings of the Hellenistic as-
tronomer, mathematician, and geographer Claudius
Ptolemy. His recently completed astronomical magnum
opus, the Syntaxis, will be revered as The Greatest
(Almagest) by generations of learned people.
Little does Ptolemy know, however, that the empire so
richly supporting Alexandrias intellectual endeavors soon
will decline and fall, depriving western Europe of any
knowledge of his work or that of his contemporaries for
centuries to come.
Fortunately, while Europe slid into its long slumber
through the Dark Ages, Islamic and Byzantine scholars
would enjoy their own Renaissance, preserving and im-
proving upon classical astronomy and its allied sciences of
mathematics and geometry for the eventual benet of all
the worlds peoples.
Sky & Telescope January 2003 51
Alexandria
Mediterranean
Sea
Ptolemys Legacy. This print from Andreas Cellariuss Atlas Coelestis seu Harmonia Macrocos-
mica (1660) shows the Ptolemaic view of the Moons motion: our natural satellite revolves clockwise
in its epicycle (blue-filled circle) as it moves counterclockwise along its deferent orbit. To better ac-
count for the Moons location in the sky, the deferents center revolves clockwise around the Earth
(at the very center) along the innermost circle. Unfortunately, this embellishment pulls the Moon
Earthward at first and last quarter, erroneously increasing its apparent diameter.
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Ptolemys Era
In his Almagest, written around A.D. 150, Ptolemy wove his
own ideas with strands from Plato, Aristotle, Hipparchus, and
other Greek philosophers and astronomers. The resulting cos-
mological compendium not only was descriptive; it also had
predictive powers. For example, at that time the Earth was
viewed as being in the center of the cosmos, surrounded by
the Moon, Sun, and planets, which revolved around it in large
spherical orbits called deferents. In turn, Ptolemy pictured
these heavenly bodies revolving in smaller orbits, called epi-
cycles, each centered on a point that traveled along the defer-
ent. While not necessarily intended to represent reality, these
mathematical devices could be used quite effectively to predict
a heavenly bodys location in the sky at a given time.
The ability to foretell celestial events had practical applica-
tions in planting crops, observing religious festivals, and keep-
ing time. But Ptolemys model clearly also had philosophical
signicance, and it addressed the Greek urge to understand the
cosmos and humanitys place in it.
In addition to his cosmographic theories, Ptolemy devel-
oped a catalog of 1,022 stars in 48 constellations named for
mythological gures. This catalog identied individual stars by
their locations within constellations (on the end of the tail,
for example) and listed their relative brightnesses as well as
their ecliptic longitudes and latitudes. Ptolemys constellations
are still with us; in fact, they dominate todays star maps and
planispheres.
As an Empire Declined
Much of Ptolemys work disappeared in Europe over the cen-
turies to follow. How did this happen? For one thing, political
inghting, social decay, and invasions by Germanic tribes led
to a gradual decline in the western part of the Roman Empire,
centered on Rome itself. In A.D. 330, such pressures led Em-
peror Constantine the Great to move his capital to the eastern
city of Byzantium on the Bosporus Strait, in what is now
Turkey. (He immodestly renamed the new seat of his empire
Constantinople.)
As the collapsing western Roman empire headed toward its
final fall in the 5th century A.D., several factors contributed to
the loss of classical astronomical knowledge. In his 1998
book, Astronomies and Cultures in Early Medieval Europe, Uni-
versity of West Virginia historian Stephen McCluskey explains
that the Roman educational system increasingly was geared
52 January 2003 Sky & Telescope
The Mythological Sky.
Within this first edition of Johann
Schaubachs Eratosthenis Catasterismi
(1795) lies this foldout chart of Ptole-
mys Northern Hemisphere constella-
tions. Schaubachs was the first Latin
translation, from the Greek, summa-
rizing the mythology of the constella-
tions as described by Eratosthenes
(c. 284192 B.C.).
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The Church and the Calendar
But other aspects of astronomy were preserved dur-
ing the Middle Ages in the Latin-speaking West, pri-
marily because of the Catholic Churchs growing in-
uence and its dependence on calendrical events.
For example, it was important to establish when
the solstices and equinoxes occurred because these
events became associated with the conception
and birth of Jesus Christ and John the Baptist.
The Julian calendar became the basis for Christ-
ian rituals, since with it many religious holidays
could be given xed dates that were independ-
ent of celestial events. (Easter Sunday was an
important exception, as the relevant biblical
events were based not on specic calendar
dates but on the Jewish Passover and its as-
sociated full Moon.)
Another concern of medieval astronomers
was determining the time for monastic prayers. In
addition, monks were involved in a number of feasts and cere-
monies throughout the month, and it was important for them to
keep track of their dates. Until about the 10th century A.D., when
water clocks began to be used more commonly, the stars were the
principal means of nocturnal timekeeping at most monasteries.
The poetic and philosophical aspects of astronomy also con-
tinued to be pursued throughout the Middle Ages. Religious
overtones inuenced cosmology, with the Earth remaining in
Sky & Telescope January 2003 53
Nuremberg
Venice
Alexandria
Baghdad
Constantinople
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Counting Out the Days.
This calendar leaf for October is from a
Book of Hours handwritten by an un-
known scribe on vellum (calfskin)
around 1460, probably in a French or
Low Countries monastery. It depicts
saints days, feasts, dominical letters,
and other calendrical information. KL
denotes Kalendarium, and the top
two lines inform the user that October
has 31 calendar and 30 lunar days.
(The remaining days for October are
listed on the other side of the page.)
Countdown to Easter. Calendrical and thus ultimately as-
tronomical knowledge was essential to observing Christian holi-
days. The outer circles, with letters from A to G, represent the days of
the week on this printed calculating device, or volvelle, here seen in
the Spanish edition of Giovanni Gallucis Theatro del Mundo y del Tiem-
po, first published in Venice in 1588. On any given year the inner
pointer could be set to an important date (January 1, say), and if one
knew the years dominical letter one could determine the number of
Sundays until Easter.
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NICK AND CAROLYNN KANAS COLLECTION
toward making civic leaders out of the sons of aristocrats. In
astronomy, Ptolemys mathematics was not emphasized as
much as Aratuss poetry or Platos philosophy. Mathematical
astronomy did not meet the needs of people who were con-
cerned with war and political survival, and scholars began to
lose the technical skills needed to comprehend Greek theory.
In addition, Latin translations of earlier Greek works were
imperfect.
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principles of spherical geometry (unlike Ptolemys works);
their tables of the heavenly bodies described only mean (aver-
age) motions and not variations therefrom; and they placed
stars inaccurately within the constellations.
Islamic Influences
In contrast to the Latin West, classical Greek astronomical
concepts were well known in Islamic lands. The Islamic reli-
gion was founded by the prophet
Muhammad (A.D. 570632), who
was persecuted and driven out of his
native Mecca but ed to Medina
with his followers in A.D. 622. His
teachings took hold, and through
faith and warfare they rapidly spread
throughout the Middle East, North
Africa, and into Spain. In A.D. 762,
Muhammads successors founded a
new capital, Baghdad, which soon
54 January 2003 Sky & Telescope
the center of the cosmos according to Gods divine laws. For this
reason, the clergy admired Platos notions of a divine creator
and his geocentric emphasis. Another writer who inuenced as-
tronomical thought during the Middle Ages was Martianus
Capella (c. A.D. 365440) His popular textbook, written in
Latin, used allegory and poetry to describe the seven liberal arts.
In his astronomy section, Capella presented a model of the solar
system, stemming from earlier Greek sources, that had Mercury
and Venus orbiting the Sun while the Moon, the Sun, and the
other planets orbited the Earth. Nicholas Copernicus later cited
Capella when he developed his famous heliocentric model.
In the 8th and 9th centuries, the court of Charlemagne in
Aachen attempted to systematize astronomical learning along
religious lines. Schools were established for the clergy and for
the children at court. Ancient texts were collected, copied, and
disseminated, and newly written anthologies included solar
phenomena, weather, computational tables, the structure of
the heavens, and constellation descriptions. However, as Mc-
Cluskey points out, these anthologies lacked the mathematical
Evolving World Views. This print, from an atlas by Jean-Baptiste Nolin (c. A.D. 1750), shows an armillary sphere (center) surrounded
by four models for the solar system: the Sun-centered Copernican model (upper left), the Earth-centered Ptolemaic model (upper right), and
two hybrids (Tychos, lower left; and Capellas, lower right).
Baghdad
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became a center of astronomical learning as the Islamic em-
pire expanded into Christian and northern Indian lands.
Scholarly Muslims were exposed to classical manuscripts and
translated many, including those of Ptolemy and other ancient
astronomers, from the original Greek into Arabic.
Besides a desire for learning encouraged by enlightened
caliphs, Muslims had astrological and religious reasons for
pursuing astronomical knowledge. Such knowledge was help-
ful in locating the direction of Mecca for daily prayers and in
precisely determining when to pray and to fast.
Advances were made in Ptolemaic theory and empirical as-
tronomy alike at Islamic observatories. For exam-
ple, Islamic astronomers developed a type of astro-
nomical table called the zij listing quantities like
the mean motions and true positions of the heav-
enly bodies as well as calendrical information relat-
ed to the risings and settings of the Sun and Moon.
These tables were based on Greek, Indian, and Is-
lamic observations. Especially inuential was the zij
developed by the Baghdad astronomer and math-
ematician Muhammad Ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi
around A.D. 840. As one of the earliest Arabic as-
tronomical documents to be translated, it was to
circulate widely in western Europe.
Islamic astronomers also rened the astrolabe, a
calculating device originated by the Greeks that
projected the heavens onto a metal plate, enabling
them to predict positions of the heavenly bodies
and to tell time by the stars. In the 10th century
A.D., the Baghdad astronomer Abd Al-Rahman al-
Su (A.D. 903986) integrated Ptolemys star cata-
log with Arab traditions, and in his Book of the
Fixed Stars he presented detailed constellation
boundaries as well as Arabic star names that were
later incorporated into the Greek system used
today (Fomalhaut, Algol, and Aldebaran are but
three familiar examples).
Three centuries later, the inuential Persian as-
tronomer and mathematician Nasir Al-Din al-Tusi
(A.D. 12011274) critiqued Ptolemys system and
developed new geometric planetary models of his
own. He also founded the great Maragha Observatory, whose
foundations still survive some 80 kilometers south of Tabriz in
what is now northwestern Iran.
One of al-Tusis most inuential accomplishments lay in the
area of planetary orbital theory. He noted that if a circle rolls
inside the circumference of another circle twice as large, then
any point on the inner circle would move back and forth along
a straight line. This Tusi couple theorem could be proven
geometrically, in the spirit of Ptolemy, and could be illustrated
visually to create a model of planetary motion. Models incor-
porating versions of the Tusi couple appeared in later Byzan-
Sky & Telescope January 2003 55
Islamic Astronomers at Work. This hand-
painted reproduction depicts a piece of art entitled As-
tronomers in their Observatory in Galatasaray, which ap-
pears in the Ottoman Turkish manuscript Sehinsehname,
or Book of Kings (1581). The astronomer standing at the
bottom is using a plumb bob to adjust the meridian circle
in his observatorys huge armillary sphere.
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tine manuscripts, and Copernicus made use of its principles
when discussing variations in precession (the motion of the
Earths axis around the ecliptic pole), determining ecliptic lati-
tudes for the planets, and describing Mercurys orbit.
From the 11th to the 13th century A.D., much of Spain was
taken back from the Moors, Islamic invaders originally from
Africa. The victors were Christians from independent king-
doms, such as Castile, to the north. In the process, Greek and
Islamic astronomical knowledge was brought into western Eu-
rope. By the 11th century A.D. European scholars possessed
astrolabes and were teaching others how to use them. In the
following century a number of classical works were translated
from Arabic into Latin, among them Euclids Elements of
Geometry and al-Khwarizmis zij. The 12th century also would
see a complete Latin translation of Ptolemys Almagest from
the Arabic, though it was very literal and hard to follow.
The stage was set for Latin astronomy to move from the po-
etic and philosophical to the precise and mathematical. How-
ever, this process was slow and incomplete. The main centers
of learning were the new universities, which gained promi-
nence as towns grew and cathedral schools became increasing-
ly secular. But astronomy remained a liberal art more than a
mathematical science, and for several more centuries it was to
remain dominated by the Aristotelian concept of heavenly
bodies moving around the central Earth in perfect, unchang-
ing, concentric, crystalline spheres made from the ether.
The Byzantine Connection
Even less widely known than the
Islamic impact on European as-
tronomy is that of the other great
repository of classical Greek learn-
ing: the Greek-speaking Byzantine
Empire, especially its capital city
of Constantinople. Founded by
Greeks in the 7th century B.C.
under its original name of Byzan-
tium, Constantinople became the
capital of the entire Roman Em-
pire under Constantine the Great, and it remained the capital of
the empires eastern realm when Rome fell.
As the principal city of what later would be called the
Byzantine Empire, Constantinople became an important
strategic, trade, and cultural center (a position it holds to this
day as Istanbul, Turkey). There a number of classical works
were preserved and discussed in their native Greek. Islamic
leaders sent envoys to purchase many of these, and they were
translated into Arabic in the 8th and 9th centuries.
In addition, evidence suggests that Byzantine scholars not
only were well versed in the mathematical astronomy of Ptol-
emy and Islamic writers and taught it in their universities; they
also conceptually advanced the classical theories with new ele-
ments of their own. For example, Emmanuel Paschos (Univer-
sity of Dortmund, Germany) and Panagiotis Sotiroudis (Uni-
versity of Thessaloniki, Greece) recently have translated and
analyzed a 13th-century Byzantine manuscript, The Schemata of
the Stars, which had been uncovered from the Vatican Library
in Rome more than 30 years earlier by the late astronomy his-
torian Otto Neugebauer. Paschos and Sotiroudis attribute the
Schemata to Gregory Chioniades (c. A.D. 12401320), a profes-
sor of medicine and astronomy in Constantinople who studied
in Persia and later became Bishop of Tabriz.
The Schemata listed and illustrated the constellations and
their constituent stars; the mechanisms of lunar and solar
eclipses; and the uses of epicycles, deferents, and eccentric (off-
center) orbits to describe the motions of heavenly bodies
around the Earth. The work shows that Chioniades and his
contemporaries knew spherical geometry and trigonometry,
and that they were inuenced not only by Ptolemy but also by
al-Tusi and other Arabic and Persian scholars.
The Schemata also contains a number of variations and im-
56 January 2003 Sky & Telescope
Epicycles Updated. This photograph shows a page from The
Schemata of the Stars, a recently translated 13th-century Byzantine
manuscript. The lower figure shows how the two circles constituting a
Tusi couple can generate back-and-forth motion along a straight line.
The upper figure places a Tusi couple upon a deferent to describe the
Suns motion around the Earth; the resulting solar motion is equiva-
lent to the eccentric (off-center) trajectory that Ptolemy had postulat-
ed centuries earlier.
Constantinople
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provements upon these earlier works, including an epicyclic
model for the Suns orbit around the Earth (Ptolemy had fa-
vored a simpler eccentric approach); a new model, with eccen-
tric orbits, for the revolutions of the superior planets; and im-
provements in the trajectory of Mercurys epicycle.
Paschos and Sotiroudis explain that the Schemata made its
way to Italy, possibly in the 15th century A.D. There it may have
inuenced Copernicus, who had learned Greek and studied
church law, medicine, and astronomy in several Italian cities.
Other evidence suggests that Byzantine documents made
their way into Europe through Italy. In her 1998 book, Worldly
Goods: A New History of the Renaissance, University of London
English professor Lisa Jardine recounts that on February 8,
1438, Byzantine Emperor John VIII, Eastern Orthodox Patri-
arch Joseph II, and an entourage of some 700 bishops, monks,
and learned laymen arrived in Florence, where the court of
Pope Eugenius IV then was located. The meeting had been
called to reconcile the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox
churches. The Byzantines brought a number of books and
texts in the original Greek, including the works of Plato, Aris-
totle, Euclid, and Ptolemy. While the leaders continued to hag-
gle over church doctrine and negotiate (unsuccessfully) the
merger of their two churches, the intellectual experts on both
the Byzantine and Latin sides exchanged philosophical and
mathematical ideas. Jardine emphasizes the importance of this
contact:
It was books written in Greek [that] most impressed the schol-
ars in Florence. The inability of monastic copyists to transcribe
the unfamiliar alphabet of Greek script, and the difculty in
learning classical Greek anywhere in the West had, for instance,
cut the intellectual tradition off from the work of the great
Greek mathematicians and geometers Euclid, Apollonius,
Pappus, Ptolemy.
She further notes that such books along with lectures
given by Greek scholars during this meeting contributed to
the vogue for Greek learning in Italy, and that they led the
wealthy Florentine patron of the arts, Cosimo de Medici, to
found his Platonic Academy.
Around A.D. 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Otto-
man Turks, a number of Byzantine scholars moved to Italy,
bringing with them their personal libraries of rare Greek
books. Venice contained so many such migrs that the Greek
scholar and immigrant Cardinal Bessarion likened the city to
another Byzantium, and in A.D. 1468 he donated his magni-
cent collection of more than 600 books and manuscripts
(which included mathematical works by Archimedes, Apol-
lonius, and Ptolemy) to St. Marks Cathedral.
Astronomys Western Rebirth
A number of factors inuenced the rebirth and advancement of
classical astronomy, especially its more mathematical and scien-
tic aspects, in Europes Renaissance. First, adequate translations
of classical Greek texts became freely available in Latin; in many
cases these were translated directly by native Greek speakers from
Constantinople. Second, these translations included valuable
commentaries and additions by Islamic and Byzantine scholars.
Third, the spirit of the Renaissance encouraged the advancement
of knowledge for its own sake and not solely to address religious
needs. Fourth, secular universities had become well established,
and they were increasingly inclined to transmit new scientic in-
formation to their students.
But how could the reemerging as-
tronomical ideas reach people who
were not involved with universities?
This revolutionary fth factor in the
rebirth of classical astronomical learn-
ing was the mid-1400s development
of printing using movable type. By the
late 1470s, Erhard Ratdolt was pub-
lishing scientic books in Venice,
complete with woodcut illustrations.
Between 1495 and 1498, the Venetian
printer Aldo Mannucci issued Aristo-
tles complete works, and his Aldine
Press continued to publish high-
Venice
Astronomical Publication Ascending. This page from
Scriptores Astronomici Veteres, an A.D. 1499 book from Venices Aldine
Press, describes (in Latin) the now-defunct constellation Argo Navis by
quoting the Greek poem Phaenomena, which Aratus (c. 315240 B.C.)
had written nearly two millennia previously. The figure comes from one
of the first woodcut plates ever used to depict a constellation.
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58 January 2003 Sky & Telescope
quality books by classical writers.
Another center of printing was
Nuremberg, where in 1493 Hart-
mann Schedel wrote the Nuremberg
Chronicle, an inuential geographical
text and world history with woodcut
illustrations of important people,
places, and events.
Although printed books were rel-
atively expensive initially, they found readers among people
with commercial interests such as shipbuilding and navigation
and in aristocratic families. In fact, Jardine states, having a
great library became an important status symbol among pow-
erful Renaissance men. These new collectors competed for rare
books, stimulating the book trade and motivating more trans-
lations and printings of old masterpieces. Gradually, new mar-
kets opened up for more affordable textbooks in schools and
universities, where the less privileged were exposed to the
works. Some of these books included volvelles, movable attach-
ments to book pages that could be used to perform astronom-
ical calculations. Some volvelles provided simpler but afford-
able alternatives to astrolabes made of metal.
Thus by the time of the Renaissance, classical Greek astron-
omy had returned to western Europe from Islamic and Byzan-
tine sources, at times substantially improved. The secular uni-
versities, the availability of printed books, and the humanism
of the times all set the stage for new mathematical and obser-
vational developments in astronomy, beginning with Nicholas
Copernicus and progressing through Tycho Brahe to Johannes
Kepler and Galileo Galilei.
In a parallel manner, classical Greek descriptions of the con-
stellations could be illustrated on paper in early celestial works
by Albrecht Drer, Alessandro Piccolomini, and Giovanni Gal-
lucci, and later in the great star atlases of Johann Bayer, Jo-
hannes Hevelius, John Flamsteed, and Johann Bode. Over the
quiet lake of the Middle Ages, Islamic and Byzantine scholars
had built a great bridge connecting Ptolemys mathematical as-
tronomy to the great Renaissance thinkers, and the resulting
dynamic ow of knowledge continues to this day.
Nick Kanas (nick21@itsa.ucsf.edu) is a professor of psychiatry at the
University of California, San Francisco, and the Veterans Administra-
tion Hospital, where he studies psychosocial issues affecting astronauts.
A member of the San Francisco Amateur Astronomers, he has collected
antiquarian celestial books, atlases, and prints for more than two
decades.
An Affordable Astrolabe. This volvelle (complete with its
calculating string) is from Peter Apianuss Cosmographia (1533), and it
contains a number of features found on an astrolabe, including zodiac
and month circles, unequal hour lines, and a shadow square that uses
trigonometric methods to determine the height of a distant object.
Nuremberg
Awakening Astronomical Awareness. In this 1493
Latin edition of Hartmann Schedels Nuremberg Chronicle, 9th-century
clerical leaders share the page with a supposedly calamitous comet.
As the comet is described in the paragraph covering the years A.D.
804813, it is probably not Halleys Comet, which appeared in 837.
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