Climate and Astrology in al-Andalus and Castille

Climate and Astrology in al-Andalus and Christian Iberia simultaneously reconstructs a tradition of premodern scientific thought and offers race as a framework through which that tradition should be understood. Working between Christian and Islamic sources, with special attention to texts translated from Arabic into Latin or its vernaculars, this dissertation demonstrates that the Christians and Muslims of the medieval Iberian Peninsula put climatology and astrology to work in the construction of a racial discourse. The mere presence of climatology in these archives won’t surprise specialists, who already know that Ancient Greek environmental ideas enjoyed receptions stretching into modernity. However, as this dissertation works through sources produced between the 422/1031 fall of the Cordoban caliphate and the 682/1284 death of Alfonso X of Castile, climatology emerges as more complex than is typically assumed and more common, appearing in medical treatises, magical spellbooks, and royal histories. Even more unexpected are the ways in which climatic determinisms intersected with astral determinisms. In these texts, geographic conditions like heat and sunlight appeared alongside astrological conditions, like planetary influences and Zodiac signs, to engender the traits of peoples and their homelands. This system enabled suggestions like the one offered by the qadi of Toledo. He tried to explain Indian intelligence (a phenomena he found surprising considering India’s hot climate and the darkness of Indian skin) via the influence of Saturn and Mercury. What seems at first like an impossibly specific niche–the convergence of climate and astrology as attested by medieval Muslims and Christians–is actually a fact pattern, well attested across sources both famous and obscure. From a historical point of view, “astroclimatology” was a way of explaining human difference that medieval writers really did use. They described these differences as essential, hierarchical, and the result of reproduction. They did so with a frequency that can only be appreciated if we dare to read across language, genre, and chronology. From a historiographic and methodological point of view, attention to this topic requires us to survey several premodern historical scenes, both Western and nonwestern, at once. Without requiring an embrace of the term, this dissertation invites readers to see medieval race not as a necessary prelude to European dominance in the modern era, but as a series of contingent ideological potentials which corresponded to material conditions like conquest and enslavement in ways we do not yet understand, and which may merit further examination.