Later in 1195, the caliph ended Averroes's sentence practically before it began, and sent orders for the philosopher to rejoin his court in Marrakech. This reversal of positions resulted from the fact that al-Mansur no longer needed the help of the fuqaha: on July 19, 1195, he had scored a victory against the Christians at Allarcos (ah-YAHdr-kohs), a town between Cordoba and Toledo. So Averroes went to Marrakech, where he lived less than three more years. He died in 1198, and al-Mansur followed him by just a few months.
The career of Priscian, who flourished in c. A. D. 500, had many parallels to Averroes's life. Whereas Averroes lived in a European country dominated by an African power, Priscian grew up in a part of North Africa dominated by Vandal invaders from Europe. Both men represented the end of a civilization—Arabic and Roman, respectively—and both men preserved the learning of the distant past for future generations.
Priscian was a grammarian, or a specialist in grammar—specifically, Latin grammar. Grammar textbooks, as every student knows, require the use of sentences as examples; but instead of making up his own sentences, Priscian used great quotes from the esteemed poets of Greece and Rome. Thus thanks to Priscian, a whole range of materials by writers such as Homer in the earliest days of Greece to the late Roman scholars were preserved at a time when barbarians were destroying important texts.
Priscian wrote a long poem concerning the Roman weights and measures, which provides an encyclopedic array of knowledge to students of Roman life. In addition, he produced at least one example of a panegyric (pan-uh-JY-rik), a highly popular form in the later Roman Empire. Panegyrics were poems praising a ruler, in Priscian's case the Byzantine emperor Anas-tasius. Priscian's most significant work, however, was the sixteen-book Institutiones grammaticae, which became a classic grammar text used by Alcuin (see English Scholars, Thinkers, and Writers entry) and others in the Middle Ages.
Though it seemed that al-Mansur had saved the caliphate, in fact Allarcos was the last significant victory by Muslim armies in Spain. Fourteen years later, in 1212, the Spanish Christians scored a decisive victory at Las Navas de Tolosa, which effectively ended Moorish rule in Spain.
The brilliance of Muslim civilization had long before faded away in its homelands of Arabia, Syria, Iraq, and Persia far to the east. For a time, Islamic culture had thrived in the west, thanks to the successive caliphates that ruled Morocco and the Iberian Peninsula. Now that flame, too, had gone out; but in a turn of events that would have probably surprised Averroes, the torch of his ideas was passed to Christian Europe.
Ever since Christians reconquered Toledo in 1085, Western Europeans had taken a renewed interest in the an-
Cient treasures of Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic learning preserved by the Spanish caliphate. This interest had grown over subsequent years, and when the Reconquista brought a new flood of works by Averroes and others into Christendom, these were met with enthusiasm. Soon translations of Aver-roes's work appeared in English, German, and Italian, and more were to follow. Averroes would have an enormous impact on Europe in the years to come—and there was an irony in that, because as a devout Muslim, he would have had little admiration for the societies that admired him.
World History
