The Alfonsine Tables mentioned in 1304

It is widely accepted that the Alfonsine Tables were compiled at the court of King Alfonso X in Toledo sometime between 1252 and 1272. A perplexing fact about their early history, however, is that there are no traces of their existence before the early 1320s, when they suddenly appear as the result of the work of a group of Parisian astronomers named John Vimond, John of Murs, John of Ligneres and John of Saxony. This fact led Emmanuel Poulle to conclude that the Alfonsine Tables were created by those Parisian astronomers without any ‘Alfonsine’ antecedent. ¹

The purpose of this note is to report the existence of such an antecedent. MS Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Conv. Soppr. 414, contains, on f. 46r-60r, the star catalogue excerpted from Ptolemy’s Almagest in the translation of Gerard of Cremona, where the longitudes of all stars have been adjusted +7°05′. At a later stage, the scribe added, for all stars, another set of coordinates, this time adjusted +17°08′, that is, the precessional increment commonly found in the Alfonsine star catalogue. ² At about the same later stage, the scribe also added a number of glosses in the margins of the star catalogue. ³ Among them is the following one on the last page (f. 60r, see Figure 1, bottom left):

Notandum quod super tabulas hic positas ab antiquo addunt nove tabule Alfunsi 10 gradus et 3 minuta. Sed anno domini 1304 addebantur ad hoc 23 minuta. Et antique tabule hic posite addunt super tabulas Ptho<lome>i in Almagesti de stellis fixis 0 signum, 7 gradus, 5 minuta, ita quod tempus presentis anni, scilicet 1304, addit super tempus Pth<olome>i 0 signum, 17 gradus, 8 minuta.

It should be noted that the new tables of Alfunsus add 10°03′ to the ancient tables given here. But in the year 1304, 23′ were added to this. And the ancient tables given here add 7°05′ to Ptolemy’s tables of the fixed stars in the Almagest, so that the time of the present year, i.e. 1304, adds 17°08′ to the time of Ptolemy.

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Figure 1.

MS Florence, BML, Conv. Soppr. 414, f. 60r. Last page of the star catalogue, including the first two glosses examined here (bottom left and bottom right respectively).

This gloss makes it plain that its author was writing in 1304 and was aware of the Alfonsine Tables or, at least, of the Alfonsine star catalogue. The increment +23′ between the Alfonsine positions and the ‘present’ year 1304 suggests that the glossator knew the epoch of the Alfonsine star catalogue, even though he failed to add those 23 minutes to the final result (third sentence), where we would have expected 17°31′ instead of 17°08′ for the year 1304.

The date 1304 is congruent with the script and finds confirmation in another gloss on the same page (f. 60r, see Figure 1, bottom right), where the scribe speaks of 1185 years elapsed since Ptolemy’s epoch of 118 (!) A.D. (118 + 1185 = 1303):

Consideratio Ptho<lome>i de Corde Leonis, dictione 7 Almag<esti>, fuit facta anno domini nostri Ihesu Christi 118. Et fuit tunc Cor Leonis, sicut in suis tabulis continetur, scilicet (?) 4.2.30, in secundo gradu Leonis et 30 minuto. Est ergo addendus nunc, isto tempore, motus octave spere 1185 ann<orum>.

Ptolemy’s observation of Cor Leonis [Regulus] in Book VII of the Almagest was made in 118 A.D. And Cor Leonis was then, as recorded in his tables, that is, 4.2.30, at 2°30′ Leo. We must therefore add now, at this time, the motion of the 8^th sphere for 1185 years.

A date presumably close to 1304 occurs in yet another gloss written on the first page of the star catalogue (f. 46r, see Figure 2, top right corner, in red):

Si 10 gradus et 3 minuta in longitudine, nunc vero est motus 8 spere 10 gradus 23 minuta, scilicet anno 13. . . (?). Adde ergo hoc super longitudinem istarum tabularum <de> (?) presenti tempore.

If 10°03′ in longitude, the motion of the 8^th sphere is 10°23′ at present, that is in the year 13. . . (?). Add therefore this to the longitude of these tables for the present time.

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Figure 2.

MS Florence, BML, Conv. Soppr. 414, f. 46r. First page of the star catalogue, including the third gloss examined here (top right, in red).

The last two digits of the date cannot be read because they were cut off as the page was trimmed, but the difference in the precessional increment between 20′ (10°23′–10°03′) and 23′ (given in the first gloss above) suggests, if the figures are correct, that this gloss was copied a few years before 1304, probably in 1300 or 1301, by which date the glossator was already aware of the Alfonsine Tables.

The place where these glosses originated is more difficult to ascertain. The Florence MS was copied by an English scribe around the middle of the 13th century, and perhaps before 1263, a date given as the present year in a long note added on the last page of the manuscript. ⁴ The codex includes four items: (1) the Almagesti minor (f. 1r–45r), (2) two diagrams and a note on retrogradation, inc. ‘Nota: P est centrum terre, O centrum ecentrici deferentis. . .’ (f. 45v), (3) Ptolemy’s star catalogue (f. 46r–60r) and (4) a treatise of algebra known as the Liber restauracionis (f. 60v–63v). One of the models of the Florence MS has been recently identified as MS Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 16657 (first half of the 13th century), which contains items 1–3 in the same order, including the Almagesti minor with the same variant readings and Ptolemy’s star catalogue with the same values adjusted +7°05′, an adjustment which has not been found in any other context. ⁵ The Paris MS was part of the library of Richard of Fournival (d. 1260) in Amiens and its content was fully recorded in Richard’s Biblionomia written c. 1250. ⁶ On Richard’s death, the manuscript passed into the hands of Gerard of Abbeville, master of theology in Paris, who in turn bequeathed his library to the College of Sorbonne in 1272. It follows that the Florence MS was copied either in Amiens or in Paris. This, however, does not tell us where the manuscript was glossed in 1304, that is, several decades later. One possibility would be Paris, where the newly founded College of Sorbonne (1257) had quickly established itself as a leading centre for astronomical studies in Europe, with scholars such as Peter of Limoges, Giles of Lessines, William of Saint-Cloud, Franco of Poland, Peter of Dacia, Peter of Saint-Omer, John of Sicily and Peter of Abano, among others, and it is noticeable that the value of the precession was a recurrent subject of enquiry among them. ⁷ It is also documented that new Alfonsine material travelled from Toledo to Paris at an early date. This is shown by Peter of Limoges (fl. c. 1260–1306), who had commissioned beautiful copies of two massive Alfonsine translations, namely Haly Abenragel’s (ʿAlī ibn Abi al-Rijāl) De iudiciis astrorum and Haly Abenrudian’s (ʿAlī ibn Riḍwān) commentary on Ptolemy’s Quadripartitum, both translated by Egidius de Tebaldis in Toledo after 1253 and after 1257 respectively. ⁸ Another possibility, however, would be northern Italy. We know that the Florence MS was brought to Italy at some point, for it was kept at the Basilica della Santissima Annunziata in Florence in the early 18th century. The transfer of the manuscript to Italy may have already happened with the scribe himself, for, according to Stefan Georges (private communication), the glosses for 1303–1304, unlike the rest of the manuscript, exhibit a mixture of English and Italian characteristics, as if the scribe had been staying in Italy for some time. Interestingly – and perhaps not just a coincidence – the Alfonsine Tables were known in northern Italy at an early date, as witnessed by Thaddeus of Parma, who, in his Expositio super theorica planetarum completed in Bologna on 12 July 1318, explains that the ‘authors of the tables of King Alfunsius’ (‘compositores tabularum regis Alfunsi’) advocate a precession model that combines trepidation and linear precession. ⁹

To sum up, the place where the Florence MS was glossed must remain an open question for now, but for the present purpose the important point is this: an astronomer writing in 1304 (and, perhaps, as early as 1300–1301) knew the Alfonsine star catalogue, its precessional increment +17°08′ and its name, the new tables of Alfunsus.