CONSTANTINE THE AFRICAN (c. is one of the few important medical figures of the Middle Ages. He was the initiator of the significant "Arabist" movement, the process of translation into Latin from Arabic. Legends have clustered about his name and his early career is still obscure.
It is said that he was born at Carthage. He was certainly an Arabic-speaking Christian and led a wandering life. Later he claimed that he had studied in many Eastern centres of learning. The legends tell that on his return to his native city his learning brought him under suspicion of witchcraft and he had to flee. We hear of him in the service of the Norman duke, Robert Guiscard (q.v.). This was probably about 1071, in Sicily rather than at Salerno, with which Constantine's name is more closely linked. There is in fact some evidence that Constantine was actually a native of Sicily rather than of Carthage, and it must be remem bered that some Arabic was still spoken in Sicily in the eleventh century. Moreover, in addition to Arabic he knew some Latin and had a smattering of Greek, and this trilinguality is fully consistent with his birth in the "many-tongued isle" where all three vernacu lars were in use. Constantine probably followed Robert Guiscard to Salerno. There he became a monk and ended his days at the Benedictine house of Monte Cassino. He translated at Monte Cassino a number of Arabic works into Latin, and it seems that he had help with the Latin. The character of these works and the knowledge displayed in them suggest that he had neither visited Cairo nor Irak in the way that he claimed. The books themselves are mainly renderings of works by Jewish writers living in North Africa. These works, though wretchedly translated, are yet ex ceedingly important for the history of culture. They represent the first inflow of a group of new ideas and their appearance marks the end of the "dark ages" and the dawn of the scholastic period.
Among the works which Constantine thus conveyed were two philosophical treatises by Isaac Israeli (855-955) of Kairosuan, known to the West as Isaac the Jew. One of these writings, On definitions, contains an account of some of the favourite terms used by the Latin scholastic, and later adopted by them from him. Another, On the Elements, was an exposition of Aristotelian physics. From the same author he translated a number of medical works which he issued under his own name. He treated similarly the works of Isaac's pupil Ibn Jezzar. The most important medical work that he rendered into Latin he called Pantechne. It was in fact an abbreviated version of the Liber Regius of the Persian Ali ibn al Abbas (died 994), known as Haly Abbas to the Latins. This was extremely important as the first work which gave the Western world a view of Greek medicine as a whole, though the view was somewhat dimmed by the Arabic cloud that was around it.
Constantine sought to pass off his translations as his original work and it is probable that he never produced any independent writing. Nevertheless his works spread through Europe with ex traordinary rapidity and it is difficult to overestimate their in fluence on the ages which followed. They continued to be read until the sixteenth century and were particularly influential at the important medical school at Salerno (q.v.).