A Kingdom of Stargazers: Astrology and Authority in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon

3. The Iberian Peninsula: Land of Astral Magic

3 The Iberian Peninsula Land of Astral Magic Eustache was a wicked monk. He was a lout, a wastrel, a scoundrel, and therefore no paragon of Christian virtue. Thus was he portrayed in the thirteenth-century anonymous French poem Li Romans de Witasse le Moine, or Eustache the Monk.1 Among his other less-than-fine qualities, however, was that he also dabbled in the magical arts. He did so only after having acquired them in the Iberian city of Toledo, home to Arabic , Jewish, and Christian scholars and translators. It was there where he learned “a thousand conjurations, a thousand sortilegia, a thousand vaticinations.”2 1. Denis Joseph Conlon, ed. “Li Romans de Witasse le Moine.” Roman du trezième siècle. Édité d’après le manuscrit, fonds français 1553, de la Bibliothèque nationale, Paris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972). See also Stephen Knight and Thomas H. Ohlgren, eds., Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997). My thanks go to Tom Ohlgren for this reference. 2. Conlon, Li Romans de Witasse le Moine, 39: “Il aprist mil conjuremens, Mil caraus, mil espiremens.” The Iberian Peninsula 81 ThehistoricalEustache,anorthernFrenchpriestwholivedfromaround 1170 to 1217, became, not unlike Charlemagne or Ruy Díaz de Bivar, better known as “the Cid,” a figure in which myth, legend, and fantasy coalesced around a kernel of historical truth.3 Even though Eustache’s magical abilities are briefly described in comparison with tales of his other skills and exploits , his acquisition of those skills from Iberia nonetheless well illustrates a larger medieval perception of the Iberian Peninsula and the theme of this current chapter: that to other medieval Europeans, Spain was a shadowy land of magic. A supposedly nefarious region no good Christian should visit, lest they be tempted in acquiring secret knowledge aided by demonic agency, the Iberian Peninsula represented, in some medieval writers’ understanding , a domain of occult and dark knowledge. The presence there of Jewish and Muslim communities, whose knowledge, culture, languages, and religious practices seemed to some Christians alien, at best, and abhorrent , at worst, contributed to this understanding of Iberia. Contemporary medieval writers themselves believed Iberians to have a predisposed facility with astrology and for divining the future, which was contextualized within an apocalyptic framework. Dominican and Franciscan preachers, who foretold the advent of the Antichrist and the Apocalypse, were popular in Iberia and, in the case of Saint Vincent Ferrer, even circulated among members of elite social circles. One popular Parisian proverb from the thirteenth century, for example, deemed the Spanish as being the best preachers.4 Yet another reason why some medieval people may have perceived Spain as a land of prognosticators might be a theory ascribed to the ancient astronomer Claudius Ptolemaeus. Better known as Ptolemy, his second-century Almagest, in which he described the movements of the planets through a rigorous and mathematically complex system of uniform circular motions, was a work of seminal importance for the study of astronomy and astrology.5 In his Tetrabiblos , sometimes referred by its Latin name, Quadripartitum, Ptolemy 3. Introductions to the study of “the Cid” include R. A. Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); and the classic, yet nevertheless highly problematic, Ramón Menéndez Pidal, La España del Cid (Madrid: Editorial Plutarco, 1929). 4. Georges Adrien Crapelet, Proverbes et Dictons populaires, avec les dits du mercier et de marchands , et les Crieries de Paris, au XIIIe et XIV siècles (Paris: Impr. de Crapelet, 1831), 82. “Li meillor prégator sont en Espaingne.” My thanks go to Michael Sizer for this reference. 5. Smoller, History, Prophecy, and the Stars, 13. 82 Chapter 3 systematized various ancient astrological theories that incorporated Babylonian , Egyptian, and Indian knowledge.6 Because of his sidereal works, medieval scholars considered Ptolemy one of the foremost ancient authorities in astronomy and astrology and used his authoritative writings to legitimize their own contemporary views of astrology and astronomy.7 Nicole Oresme used Ptolemy’s geography from the Tetrabiblos, for instance, to shame those members of the French court who dabbled with judicial astrology: Again, according to Ptolemy in the Quadripartitum, those who live towards the south are more apt for the knowledge of astrology than those who live towards the north, and to this Haly adds that those who live towards the east are similarly more fitted for...