Astronomy History in Middle Ages

From about 500 to 1500, astronomy was a vital field of investigation in the medieval world. From Paris to Baghdad and beyond, treatment, philosophy, and even theology researchers carefully monitored the astrological association between the 12 signs of the zodiac and one's physical, mind, and spiritual well-being.

Middle East

The Arab and Iranian worlds had become very cultural under Islam. Many important works of knowledge from Greek astronomy, Indian astronomy, and Persian astronomy were translated into Arabic and stored and used in libraries all over the Islamic land.

Islamic astronomers put particular emphasis on observational astronomy. This led to the emergence of the first astronomical observatories in the Islamic world in the early 9th century.

Tables of the names, positions, and resolution times of stars and planets, which were known as zij, were prepared in these observatories.

In the 10th century, Abd al-Rahman Sufi made observations of the stars and described their position, magnitude, brightness, color, and maps for each constellation in his Star Book. He also provided the first descriptions and images of "a small cloud" known today as the Andromeda Galaxy. He mentions it as lying before the mouth of the great fish, an Arabian constellation. This "cloud" was familiar to Manjan Isfahani before 905 AD. In 1006, Ali bin Rizwan observed the brightest supernova in recorded history and left a detailed description of the temporary star.

At the end of the 10th century AD, a giant observatory was built near Tehran, the present capital of Iran, by an astronomer named Abu Mahmoud Hamed bin Khizr Khojandi, who observed a series of meridian transits of the sun, which enabled him to calculate the drift of the Earth's axis. He gave the sun. In the 11th century in Iran, Omar Khayyam Nishaburi collected many tables. He revised the calendar, which was more accurate than the Julian calendar and was very close to the Gregorian calendar.

Other advances of Muslims in astronomy include the collection and correction of previous astronomical data, the solution of fundamental problems in the Ptolemaic model, the development of a stable global independent of latitude by Ibrahim Zarkali, the invention of many other astronomical instruments, Abu Jaafar bin Muhammad bin Musa bin Shakir. , the belief that celestial bodies and celestial spheres obey the same physical laws as Earth, and the introduction of experimental testing by Ibn al-Shatar, who devised the first model of the moon's motion that also required physical observations.

Western Europe

After Greek scientists' significant contributions to astronomy development, it entered a relatively static period in Western Europe from Roman times to the 12th century.

This lack of progress has led some astronomers to claim that nothing happened in Western European astronomy during the Middle Ages. However, recent research has revealed a more complex conception of the study and teaching of astronomy in the period from the 14th to the 16th century.

Western Europe entered the Middle Ages with many problems that affected the intellectual production of this continent. Advanced astronomical treatises of ancient times were written in Greek, and with the decline of knowledge of that language, only simple summaries and practical texts were available for study. The most influential writers who transferred this ancient tradition to Latin were Macrobius Ambrosius Tidusius, Gaius Pliny II, Martianus Capella, and Chalcidius. In the 6th century, Bishop Gregory Tozer noted that he had learned astronomy from reading the Martianus Cappella. He used this introductory astronomy to describe how monks could determine the time of night prayer by looking at the stars.

In the 7th century, the English monk St. Bede de Venerable published an influential text, On the Reckoning of Time, which provided churches with the practical astronomical knowledge needed to calculate the proper date for Easter using a method called calculus. This text remained an essential element in clerical education from the 7th century until the rise of universities in the 12th century.

The extent of the surviving ancient Roman writings on astronomy and the teachings of Beda and his followers were seriously studied during the revival of learning sponsored by Charlemagne's empire. By the 9th century, rudimentary techniques for calculating planetary positions were circulating in Western Europe. Medieval scientists recognized their flaws, but texts describing these techniques continued to be copied, indicating an interest in the motions of the planets and their astronomical significance.

Building on this astronomical background, in the 10th century, European scholars such as Herbert Aurillac began traveling to Spain and Sicily in search of the teachings they had heard existed in the Arabic-speaking world. "At that time, the frontiers of the Islamic and Arabic-speaking world had penetrated as far as Spain," where they first encountered various scientific astronomical techniques of calendar and chronology, especially those dealing with the astrolabe.

Scientists such as Hermann of Reichnau wrote texts in Latin on the use and construction of astrolabes, and others such as Walcher Malvern used astrolabes to observe the times of eclipses to test the validity of arithmetic tables.

In the 12th century, scholars traveled to Spain and Sicily in search of more advanced astronomical texts, the "Islamic Astrological Texts," which they translated from Arabic and Greek into Latin to enrich Western European astronomical knowledge. The arrival of these new texts coincided with the emergence of universities in medieval Europe. Reflecting on introducing astronomy into universities, John Sacrobosco wrote a series of influential introductory astronomy textbooks, such as Spheres, Calculus, a text on squares, and another on calculus.

In the 14th century, Nicole Ursme, the next bishop of Liszow, showed that neither the biblical texts nor the physical arguments against the motion of the Earth were proof. He presented a simple idea for the theory that the Earth moves, not the heavens.

However, she concluded: (Everyone believes, and I think that the heavens move and not the Earth because God has established a world that cannot be moved).

In the 15th century, Cardinal Nicholas Cusa proposed in some of her scientific writings that the Earth revolves around the sun and that each star is itself a distant sun.