CERTAINTY, DOUBT, AND ERRORS IN BYZANTINE

ASTRONOMY

ANNE TIHON
UniversitéCatholiquede Louvain

1. The certainties

From the beginning of their history until its end, the Byzantines
were aware that they possessed the scientific knowledge of the Greeks.
Until the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453, and even
beyond, they studied, annotated, edited, and practised the astronomy
of Ptolemy, using both the Almagest and the Handy tables.

2. The doubts

In spite of their love and admiration for Ptolemy, the Byzantines

could not conceal from themselves the fact that Ptolemy's tables
were out of date. But how were they to be corrected? The context of
the Byzantine world was very different from that found in the Islamic
world. It never happened that an Emperor patronized specific
scientific research, and practically no Byzantine made a profession
of astronomy. How would it have been possible to establish new
astronomical tables under these conditions? The Byzantines got
around the problem by adopting foreign tables, Arabic or Persian,
or, at the end of the Empire, Latin and Jewish. Only George Gemistus
Plethon made new tables towards 1433, but these were partly based
on a Hebrew version of al-Battani.
The Byzantine Empire, the history of which extended over eleven
centuries, may not be viewed as a homogeneous block. As far as
developments in astronomy were concerned, there was a well defined
rupture in 1204, when Constantinople fell to the warriors of the
Fourth Crusade. While, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, several
texts had shown a familiarity with a number of Arabic treatises, not-
hing remained of this movement after the Latin Empire ( 1 204 -1 261 ) ,
when the Byzantines, who wanted to do astronomy, had only Ptolemy.
At the end of the thirteenth century, works written in Tabriz and
Maraghah became known in Constantinople and translations of
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Arabic and Persian treatises were translated. In the end, only one
version of the "Persian Tables" was prescribed: the Persian Syntaxis
by George Chrysococces, a sometimes imperfect but intelligible
adaptation of the Zij-i Ilkhani. The Persian tables were widespread
from 1347 onwards, but did not supplant Ptolemy.

3. The errors

There were errors in abundance, to be sure! One could make a

long list of mathematical horrors found in Byzantine manuscripts.
Here and there are some records of observations, notably of solstices.
It is known that the Byzantines had instruments, but what was their
quality? There exist a few tracts on the astrolabe and some rare texts
on other instruments.
The main task for modern scholars will be to prepare good critical
editions of the Byzantine treatises of astronomy. Without such
editions, it is hard to assess the part played by Byzantine scholars in
the development and transmission of astronomical knowledge. Many
questions cannot be answered at the present stage, e.g., How deep
was the understanding of Ptolemy's Almagest in Byzantium? Why
did scholars copy so many scholia on Ptolemy's work? Was it only an
intellectual training, or did this contribute to a better understanding
of Ptolemy's work during the early renaissance? The same kind of
questions can be raised about the Byzantine adaptations of Islamic
or Jewish astronomy. We hope that further studies will allow us to
write the real history of Byzantine astronomy.