This adaptation is published with the authorization of Professor Xu Shanwei. It is an AI-assisted contemporary editorial adaptation by Clio Walker, based on Xu’s book and sources actually consulted, using a first-person guide’s voice. It is neither a new personal travelogue by the professor nor a chapter-by-chapter reproduction. Authorization does not imply his individual approval of every additional interpretation.

In the National Library of the Netherlands in The Hague there is a Latin medical manuscript with the shelfmark 73 J 6.

Scholars have shown that it was copied at the abbey of Monte Cassino in southern Italy around 1075–1085, very probably under the eye of the translator himself. It is the oldest surviving copy of the Pantegni, the first comprehensive medical textbook in Latin. Western medicine’s first full Latin manual begins with a book like this one.

The book is dedicated to the abbot, Desiderius. In his works the translator usually calls himself “Constantine the African, monk of Cassino.”

Yet the real author of the book was a tenth-century Persian physician, ʿAlī ibn al-ʿAbbās al-Majūsī. Constantine’s Latin version does not give his name.

The last story ended with Greek learning returning to the Latin West by way of Arabic. Xu Shanwei counts Constantine as the beginning of that translation movement, calling him the first great translator from Arabic into Latin. This story asks two things: how did the first Arabic medicine get into Latin, and why did it so often arrive without its authors’ names?

A Foreign Merchant in Salerno

Almost nothing reliable survives about the first half of Constantine’s life. What he left us is a few lines in the prefaces of his own books. Everything else is stories told later, and they do not agree.

One version, passed down among the physicians of Salerno, survives in a twelfth-century gloss on a medical book by a teacher who signed himself “Matthaeus F.” Most scholars take him to be Matthaeus Ferrarius of Salerno.

According to this gloss, Constantine was a “Saracen,” that is, a Muslim. He first came to Salerno as a merchant. There he met the prince’s brother, a well-known physician, and through an interpreter they talked about medicine, specifically about how to examine urine.

From that conversation he learned that Salerno had pitifully few medical books.

So he went back to Africa, spent three years gathering medical books, and then crossed the sea again with them.

The Storm off Cape Palinuro

Off Cape Palinuro, on Italy’s southwestern coast, the ship was wrecked.

Some of the books went down. Among them was the second half of al-Majūsī’s great work, the part on treatment, which became the Practica of the Pantegni.

The gloss says that in Salerno Constantine learned Italian and Latin and began translating the books he had brought from Africa. Archbishop Alfanus of Salerno was his patron. Alfanus was himself a physician and had translated medical books from Greek. He is said to have suffered from stomach trouble, and Constantine compiled a treatise On the Stomach for him. The gloss also says that Alfanus offered to pay for replacing the books of the Practica lost in the wreck.

Having compared the manuscripts, scholars think Constantine himself translated only the first two or three books of the Practica, and the rest is generally credited to his student Johannes Afflacius. The storm left a visible gap in the book.

Three Life Stories

Peter the Deacon, librarian of Monte Cassino, wrote a long biography of Constantine in the twelfth century. His version is far more marvelous.

In Peter’s telling, Constantine was born in Carthage and traveled in the East for thirty-nine years to study. First he went to Cairo and learned grammar, logic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, necromancy and music, all the learning of the Chaldeans, Arabs and Persians. Then he went on to India and Ethiopia and back to Egypt. When he came home to Carthage, his learning made his neighbors suspicious, and some even plotted to kill him. He slipped away to Salerno, where the brother of the caliph of Cairo recognized him and recommended him to the Norman duke Robert Guiscard, who treated him with great honor.

By the fifteenth century a manuscript now in London told a third story: Salernitan pirates captured him and sold him as a slave in Salerno, and he later cured the prince of Salerno of a grave illness on condition that he be freed at once.

The Italian scholar Vera von Falkenhausen judges this last version certainly legendary. The first half of Peter’s biography is rather fanciful, she writes, while the second half, about Salerno and Monte Cassino, seems fairly reliable.

The versions cannot even agree on when he reached Italy. Peter’s account implies he arrived after the Normans took Salerno in 1076. The others say a prince still ruled the city then, which could only be Gisulf II, the last Lombard prince, before 1076. Scholars lean toward an arrival before 1076, because Prince Richard I of Capua, who died in 1078, had already given him the church of St Agatha near Aversa. A newcomer would hardly have won such standing so fast.

The Translator’s Room on the Mountain

Constantine became a monk at Monte Cassino and gave the church of St Agatha to the abbey. A charter of 1098 from Prince Richard II of Capua mentions the church as a gift to the abbey from his grandfather Richard I. That fits Peter’s account, though the charter does not name Constantine. From Richard I’s death, scholars infer that Constantine entered the abbey no later than April 1078.

Those were the years of Abbot Desiderius. He took office in 1058 and launched a vast building program and large-scale book production; later historians often see this as the abbey’s high point. Alfanus and Desiderius were friends, and that friendship was probably one reason Constantine moved up the mountain.

On the mountain he had a quiet place to work and scribes to copy. Peter the Deacon lists twenty-three works he translated.

The weightiest was the Pantegni, dedicated to Desiderius; its Arabic title was The Royal Book. There was also Ibn al-Jazzār’s Provisions for the Traveler, called the Viaticum in Latin, and several books by Isaac Israeli on diet, fevers and urine. Works attributed to him also include Isḥāq ibn ʿImrān’s treatise on melancholy. All these authors practiced and wrote in the tenth century in what is now Tunisia, which, according to the biographies, was Constantine’s homeland.

By Xu Shanwei’s count, the translations by Constantine and his students included four works by Hippocrates and Galen and at least four by Arab authors.

There is one curious twist. Hippocrates’ Aphorisms and Prognostics, with Galen’s commentaries, already existed in Latin translated from Greek and were well known in Italy. Yet the Articella, the medical textbook that grew out of Salerno, used Constantine’s version translated from Arabic.

Westerners were reading Greek medicine through Arabic.

The Names Taken Out

Constantine was not a perfect translator.

His Latin was basically sound, but Latin lacked the medical words he needed, so sometimes he simply wrote the Arabic word out in Latin letters, such as soda for headache and siphac for the peritoneum. He often condensed the original’s detailed descriptions of symptoms and treatments, retold the Arab physicians’ own cases without the first person, and dropped prescriptions that called for distinctly Arabic drugs, which were probably hard to find in Salerno.

The bigger problem was authorship. A Greek translation of the Viaticum names its Arab author; Constantine’s Latin version passed as his own work.

In 1127 a Pisan named Stephen, living in crusader Antioch, translated al-Majūsī’s Royal Book again from start to finish. Xu Shanwei’s book also mentions this Pisan translating Arabic medical books in Antioch.

Stephen’s preface pulls no punches. He says he came upon the book the Arabs call “the complete art of medicine” and “the royal book.” Checking what Latin already had, he found that the last and larger part was missing entirely, and that the rest had been spoiled by the translator’s cunning fraud: the translator had removed the author’s name and the title, set himself down as the book’s inventor, and put his own name on it.

Stephen added a jab: the man had added nothing at all of his own, which plainly showed that he was a translator, not an author.

To keep his own version from being misattributed, Stephen wrote his name and the completion date on nearly every one of its twenty books.

Translator or Thief?

From then on, the label of plagiarist followed Constantine for centuries. Renaissance scholars saw him that way too.

Today’s scholars are less quick to judge.

Von Falkenhausen points out that medieval ideas of literary property differed from ours, and the lines between editor, compiler and author were blurry. Constantine himself said repeatedly that he drew on Arabic sources, though he did not always name the author. The two biographies closest to him both say he translated these books, not that he wrote them. One scholar editing a short work of his also noticed that in the oldest manuscripts the passages where Constantine speaks in the first person are often absent.

As for quality, the historian of science who compared the two versions closely found Stephen’s rendering slavishly literal and wordy, while Constantine’s free paraphrase was easier to understand and closer to the original’s sense.

Readers settled the matter in their own way. Constantine’s Pantegni spread widely: a handlist compiled in 1994 already counted 108 manuscripts, and more keep turning up. Stephen’s fuller and more faithful version survives in far fewer copies. By the twelfth century Constantine had become a school author in Salerno.

Epilogue

According to the records of Monte Cassino, Constantine died on a December 22, “old and full of days.” Which year, the sources do not say. The commonly cited 1085 or 1087 has no basis; all we can say is that he died no later than 1098 or 1099.

Later generations gave him three life stories, and called the books he translated his own.

Yet when the Latin West could read neither Greek nor Arabic, it was this stranger of uncertain origin who carried a whole unfamiliar medicine into Latin. The names he left out were found again, one by one, by later readers. The road he opened was never closed again.

Next, we go to Toledo, to a much larger translators’ table.

Sources and editorial boundaries

1. Authorized base text: Xu Shanwei, Eastern Learning’s Westward Transmission and the Revival of Western Culture, chapter 2, opening of section 2 (Constantine and his student Johannes Afflacius translating in southern Italy; “the first great translator from Arabic into Latin”; the start of the translation movement); the sections on translations of Greek and of Arabic works (four works by Hippocrates and Galen and at least four by Arab authors translated by Constantine and his students); chapter 1 on crusader contacts (a Pisan named Stephen translating Arabic medical books in Antioch); and the table of medical works (ʿAlī ibn al-ʿAbbās al-Majūsī’s Royal Book, translated by Stephen of Antioch, earlier rendered into Latin by Constantine and his students). Read in full. The base text’s passage on the Salerno school and the legend of its four founders is reserved for story 19 and not used here. 2. Vera von Falkenhausen, “COSTANTINO Africano,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 30 (1984), Treccani online, read in full. https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/costantino-africano_(Dizionario-Biografico)/ Used for: his self-styling; dedications to Desiderius and Alfanus; Peter the Deacon’s biography (Carthage, 39 years of travel, list of studies, suspicion and plot, flight to Salerno, recognition, Robert Guiscard, the gift of St Agatha, 23 works); the gloss of Matthaeus F. (Saracen merchant, the prince’s physician brother, urine, lack of books, three years in Africa, the wreck off Cape Palinuro and loss of the Practica, learning Italian and Latin, Alfanus’s offer to pay); the legendary fifteenth-century London account (BL Sloane 2426); the dating problem, Gisulf II and Richard I; the 1098 charter of Richard II; the Practica’s partial translation and Johannes Afflacius; transliterations soda and siphac; condensing, depersonalizing cases, dropping Arabic drugs; the Viaticum’s Greek and Latin versions; the plagiarism charge and medieval notions of authorship; early biographers calling him a translator; the Articella’s use of his Arabic-based Hippocratic texts; his status as a school author in twelfth-century Salerno; his death on December 22, year unknown, with 1085/1087 unsupported. 3. Outi Kaltio, The Pantegni, Theorica of Constantine the African: A Text-Historical Study of the First Medical Compendium in the Latin West (PhD dissertation, University of Helsinki, 2023), read in full for the passages cited. https://helda.helsinki.fi/server/api/core/bitstreams/ec3f5220-57b7-411f-bfae-7dcc6a68d40a/content Used for: the Pantegni as the first comprehensive medical textbook in Latin; the four medieval accounts and the Matthaeus F. gloss (Erfurt, CA 8° 62, fols. 49vb–50ra); entry into Monte Cassino before April 1078; Desiderius’s abbacy (1058–1087) and building and book production; the friendship of Alfanus and Desiderius; the Tunisian authors he translated; The Hague, KB 73 J 6, copied at Monte Cassino c. 1075–1085, probably under Constantine’s supervision (after Kwakkel and Newton 2019); the 1994 handlist of 108 manuscripts; the lesser manuscript success of Stephen’s version; death by 1099, “senex et plenus dierum.” 4. Stephen of Antioch, preface to the Regalis dispositio (1127), from the 1523 edition (fol. 5b), as quoted in Montero Cartelle et al., “El De stomacho y el plagio en Constantino el Africano,” Minerva 30 (2017): 97–121, read. https://doi.org/10.24197/mrfc.30.2017.97-121 The body retells it in plain English; the Latin: “Impegi itaque in quendam qui apud arabes medicinae complementum dicitur et regalis (sc. dispositio) librum. De quo si quid haberet latinitas requirens, eius ultimam et maiorem deesse sensi partem. Alteram vero interpretis callida depravatam fraude, nomen etenim auctoris titulumque subtraxerat, seque qui interpres exstiterat et inventorem libri posuit et suo nomine titulavit. Quae ut facilius posset et in libri prologo et in aliis multa praetermisit pluribus necessaria locis, multorumque ordines commutans nonnulla aliter hoc uno tamen observato nihil prorsus ex suis addidit. In quo manifeste nobis invenit, ipsum interpretem potius quam scriptorem fuisse.” The same article is the source for Peter’s verb transtulit, early manuscripts calling the works translations, and G. Bos’s observation on first-person passages. 5. “Stephen of Antioch,” Dictionary of Scientific Biography, via Encyclopedia.com, read. https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/stephen-antioch Used for: Stephen as a Pisan who learned Arabic in Syria; 1127 as the reliable date; Antioch as the place (questioned by some, accepted by the author); his signing and dating nearly every book; and the comparison of the two translations. 6. English Wikipedia, “Constantine the African,” read, used only for Renaissance scholars regarding him as a plagiarist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_the_African Its Sudhoff-based details (illness, an interpreter named Abbas, etc.) have unclear sourcing and are not used. 7. Boundaries: each of the three life stories is labeled with its source and reliability, and none is presented as fact. No dialogue or inner thoughts are invented for Constantine, the Salerno physician, Alfanus or Desiderius. The year of the shipwreck and the name of the prince’s brother are not recorded and are not given. The base text gives Constantine’s death as 1087; scholarship finds this unsupported, so the story says the year is unknown, no later than 1098/1099. “Readers settled the matter” is an editorial summary of the manuscript numbers. 8. Map: The Hague 73 J 6 copied at Monte Cassino, c. 1075–1085 (point at the present-day abbey). Stephen’s retranslation at Antioch, 1127 (point at present-day Antakya, Türkiye; the place has been questioned, so confidence is lower). The arrival at Salerno, the wreck off Cape Palinuro and Constantine’s death have no secure dates and are not mapped.