Michael Scot, Translator and Astrologer at the Court of Frederick II

Dante places him in the fourth pouch of Hell, among the soothsayers who walk with their faces turned backwards, and dismisses him in three cutting lines, saying that he knew the game of magical frauds. Michael Scot, born in Scotland around 1175 and who died about 1235, was in fact one of the most important translators of the Middle Ages and court astrologer to the Emperor Frederick II of Swabia.

The Translator of Toledo

Perhaps trained at Oxford and Paris, Michael moved to Toledo, the great centre where Latin scholars, helped by Jewish and Mozarabic collaborators, translated into Latin the science written in Arabic. There, in 1217, he completed the translation of al-Bitruji's astronomical treatise on the motions of the heavens. Shortly afterwards he put into Latin Aristotle's books on animals, in the Arabic version that circulated in Spain.

Even more significant was his work on Averroes's commentaries on Aristotle, which he helped to make known in the West. Scholars attribute to him, with varying degrees of certainty, the Latin versions of the great commentaries on De caelo and De anima. Without translators like him, the philosophy taught in the universities of the thirteenth century would have looked very different.

At the Court of Frederick II

From the 1220s Michael served Frederick II, the science-loving emperor who ruled from Sicily and southern Italy. For him he wrote a vast work in several parts, known as the Liber introductorius, which includes a treatise on astrology, a description of the cosmos and a text on physiognomy, the supposed art of reading character from facial features.

The Liber introductorius is an encyclopaedic and teaching work, designed for a high-ranking lay reader. Alongside astrology it contains notions of music, meteorology and medicine. Michael also discusses magic in it, distinguishing licit from illicit arts, and these very pages, read out of context, may have contributed to his reputation as a necromancer among later readers.

The Birth of the Legend

His fame as a magician spread quickly. Besides Dante, Boccaccio recalls him in a tale of the Decameron as a great master of necromancy, honoured by many gentlemen. Other stories said he could foretell his own death, which was to come from a small stone falling on his head, and that he travelled through the air on a demonic horse. These are tales that grew from century to century.

In Scotland the legend took another path. It was said that he was buried in Melrose Abbey together with his magic books, and Walter Scott took up this tradition in the poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel, published in 1805, helping to fix it in the Romantic imagination. No document, however, confirms either the place of burial or the existence of those books.

Michael Scot illustrates well the fate of many translators of Arabic science. Those who brought to Europe texts on astronomy and astrology written in an unknown language appeared to their contemporaries as keepers of a mysterious knowledge. His real work, preserved in numerous manuscripts, tells instead the story of an intellectual who laboured to bring different worlds into contact.