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| Saint Constantine of Monte Cassino |
| 29 March 2023 |
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Constantine the African (Latin: Constantinus Africanus; died before 1098/1099, Monte Cassino) was a physician who lived in the 11th century. The first part of his life was spent in Ifriqiya and the rest in Italy. He first arrived in Italy in the coastal town of Salerno, home of the Schola Medica Salernitana, where his work attracted attention from the local Lombard and Norman rulers. Constantine then became a Benedictine monk, living the last decades of his life at the abbey of Monte Cassino.
It was in Italy where Constantine compiled his vast opus, mostly composed of translations from Arabic sources. He translated into Latin books of the great masters of Arabic medicine: Razes, Ibn Imran, Ibn Suleiman, and Ibn al-Jazzar; these translations are housed today in libraries in Italy, Germany, France, Belgium, and England. They were used as textbooks from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century.
The historians of Constantine
The 12th-century monk Peter the Deacon is the first historian to write a biography of Constantine. He noted that Constantine was a Saracen, the medieval Franco-Italian term for a Muslim from North Africa. According to Peter, Constantine traveled through Babylon, India, and Ethiopia, where he became versed in science, before coming to Monte Cassino as a refugee from peers in Carthage jealous of his knowledge. However, Peter's legendary portrayal of Constantine has been questioned by some historians. Still, later historians such as Salvatore de Renzi and Charles Daremberg, curator of the National Library in Paris, and Leclerc, author of History of Arab Medicine, relied on this account. The German Moritz Steinscheider wrote a book dedicated to Constantine, which was printed in Berlin in 1865. German medical historian Karl Sudhoff created his Berber-Islamic thesis after discovering new and important documents touching on Constantine's life and religion in the village of La Trinità della Cava[citation needed], which he published in the journal Archeion in 1922. |
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