348 THE ' DE ARTE VENANDI GUM AVIBUS ' July is required before we can venture with confidence into this field. For our present purpose it is sufficient to point out that Frederick draws little or nothing from the known works of these authors, all of them brief and confined to a summary account of the various species of hawks and falcons and to precepts respecting their training and diseases. Even King Roger's falconer, whom Albertus Magnus quotes specifically through the intermediary of Frederick, is not mentioned in the manuscripts of the De Arte thus far examined. All these writers would have been useful primarily in relation to the treatment of diseases, and this part of Frederick's work, if ever written, has yet to be discovered. Besides bringing skilled falconers from the East, 1 the emperor also had their writings translated for his own use. At least one such work has come down to us in numerous copies, the treatise of an Arab falconer, Moamyn, De Scientia Venandi per Aves, as turned into Latin by Frederick's interpreter Theodore and cor- rected by the emperor himself at the siege of Faenza (1 240-1 ). 2 Master Theodore of Antioch, who here styles himself ' the last of the emperor's servants ', is a characteristic figure of this cosmo- politan court. 3 In 1239 he casts the imperial horoscope at Padua ; 4 in the register of the following year he drafts Frederick's Arabic letters to the king of Tunis, mixes his syrups of violets, and acts as his trusty messenger ; 5 while he also appears in the mathe- matical correspondence of Leonardo Pisano, who addresses him as imperialis aule summe philosopher His preface, after an elaborate The reference is apparently to a lost work in Provencal, whether prepared under the king's direction or merely dedicated to him does not appear. Werth, xii. 154 f., 166-71, thinks he can identify it as the source of other passages in Daude. 1 Preface, supra ; also MS. M, fo. 104 v (ed. Schneider, p. 163) : ' non negleximus ad nos vocare expertos huius rei tarn de Arabia quam de regionibus undecumque, ab eo tempore scilicet in quo primitus proposuimus redigere in librum ea que sunt huius artis, et accepimus ab eis quicquid melius noverant, sicut diximus in principio '. 2 ' Incipit liber magistri Moamini falconerii translatus de arabico in latinum per magistrum Theodorum phisicum domini Federici Romanorum imperatoris, et correptus est per ipsum imperatorem tempore obsidionis Faventie,' Rome, Biblioteca Angelica, MS. 1461, fo. 73 ; see Narducci, Catalogue Codd. MSS., p. 628. The mention of correc- tion by Frederick at the siege of Faenza also appears in a manuscript in private hands and in the French translation mentioned below ; see Werth, xii. 175-7. Other manuscripts not mentioned by Werth are : Vatican, Vat. Lat. 5366, fos. l-33 v , 68 v -75 v (saec. xiii) ; Regina Lat. 1446, fos. 31-70 (c. 1300) ; University of Bologna, MS. Lat. 164 ( 153), fos. 33-49 v (Studi Italiani di Filologia Classica, xvi. 169). This would seem to be the ' librum de animalibus traductum a domino Theodoro ' which is mentioned in the papal library in 1475 : Muntz and Fabre, La Bibliotheque du Vatican au XV e Siecle (Paris, 1887), p. 271. 3 See, in general, Amari, Storia dei Musulmani di Sicilia, iii. 692-5 ; Werth, xii. 177 ; Steinschneider, in Vienna Sitzungsherichte, cxlix, 4, p. 79 ; Langlois, La Connais- sance de la Nature et du Monde au Moyen Age (Paris, 191 1 ), pp. 185 ff . ; Sudhoff in Archiv fur Geschichte der Medizin, ix. 1 (1915). 4 Muratori, Scriptores, viii. 228. 6 Bohmer-Ficker, Regesta, nos. 2617, 2803, 2810. • Buoncompagno, Scritti di Leonardo Pisano (Rome, 1857), ii. 247, 279.
