During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a wide movement of Latin translations from Arabic texts developed in Spain and Italy. Since various Islamic classifications of science did regard alchemy as a discipline in its own right, many treatises were translated.
The Liber de compositione alchimiae of ‘‘Morienus,’’ translated by Robert of Chester in 1144, is generally considered to be the first alchemical treatise known in the Latin West. This text reports a dialogue between the caliph Khalid b. Yazid (c. 668-704/709), known as the first Arabic alchemist in the Islamic tradition, and the monk Maryanus, a legendary disciple of the Greek alchemist Stephanos of Alexandria; the authenticity is very doubtful, this work is pseudonymous. Translations of many classical works of alchemy were made in the subsequent period. Gerard of Cremona (1141-1187) translated three treatises, one from the corpus attributed to Jabir b. Hayyan (a very large corpus of texts probably written during the end of the eighth century and the ninth century), the Liber divinitatis de septuaginta (the Book of Divinity, a part of the Kitab al-sab‘tn, the Book of Seventy), and two works assigned to Pseudo-Razl, including the De aluminibus et salibus (on alums and salts), a technical text which gained a wide diffusion (it was a major source to Vincent of Beauvais for alchemy). Other works of the two main Arabic alchemists were translated, such as the Liber misericordiae (Kitab al-rahima, the Book of Forgiveness) of Jabir b. Hayyan and the Secretum secretorum (Kitab al-asrar, the Book of the Secrets) of AbU Bakr al-RazI (854-925/935), along with pseudepigraphical texts. Some alchemical treatises attributed to Avicenna were also translated, such as the Ad Hasen regem epistola de re tecta (Risalat al-ikstr, Epistle on the Elixir), which might be genuine, and the De anima in arte alchemiae (The Soul in the Art of Alchemy), which is spurious and exerted a great influence. In a more allegorical vein, the Turba philosophorum (Mushaf al-jama‘a, Book of the Community), a discussion between legendary Greek alchemists, and the Tabula chemica (al-Ma’ al-waraqt wa-l-ard al-najmiyya, The Silvery Water and Starry Earth) by ‘‘Senior Zadith’’ (Muljammad ibn Umayl, first half of the tenth century) were translated. Among these translations we also find some treatises less imbued with alchemy, as for instance the De secretis naturae (Kitab sirr al-khaltqa, Book of the Secret of Creation) ofBallnas (Pseudo-Apollonius of Tyana): translated by Hugo of Santalla before 1151, it contains the Emerald Tablet, a very short and enigmatic alchemical text attributed to Hermes, which gained currency in the West.
From Arabic alchemy major theoretical concepts were imported, such as the theory of mercury and sulphur as the two principles of metals. All metals are made by the mixture and cooking of mercury and sulphur in the depths of the earth during a period of hundreds of years. Modern appellations are misleading: mercury in that time was considered to be a cold and moist principle, whereas sulphur was regarded as a hot and dry principle. The differences between metals depended on the purity of these principles and on the place and the duration of the cooking. The theory of elixirs is also typical of Arabic alchemy: in order to transmute base metals into gold, the alchemist has to balance the properties of a body (coldness, heat, moisture, and dryness). He will achieve this by using a preparation called ‘‘elixir.’’ This preparation is made from the distillation of materials (generally organic substances such as hair, eggs, blood, etc., but these substances are technically called ‘‘stones’’).
Both trends of Arabic alchemy, the technical and the allegorical, found their way into the West, but the distinction is less clear. The reception of Arabic alchemy was a complex movement. Scholars believed that alchemy could offer a major technological contribution to the knowledge of minerals. Alchemy never penetrated durably the academic world, however, in spite of several attempts. One of the major reasons for this is to be found in a translation made by Alfred of Sareshel about 1200 of a section of Avicenna’s Kitab al-Shifa’, in which the possibility of transmuting species is denied (in a well-known passage called the Sciant Artifices). The translator added this section at the end of Aristotle’s Meteora (under the title of De mineralibus, more generally known today, although erroneously, as the De congelatione et conglutinatione lapidum) and it was therefore regarded as one of Aristotle’s genuine works. This wrong assumption was largely responsible for the development of what we commonly call the alchemical debate, in reference to the fierce discussion among the thirteenth and fourteenth-century scholars about the possibility of transmutation.
One of the major problems met with by the translators of alchemical works was that a large part of the recipes that formed the basis of the practicae was transmitted orally. Reading these recipes was very difficult and many words were coded (generally to hide production secrets). Some of these Arabic codes are found in Latin alchemy, as translations or transcriptions. Moreover, the method called verbum de verbo (translation word for word) of many translators made texts quite difficult to understand.
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