350 THE ' DE ARTE VENANDI CUM AVIBUS' July After Moamyn, Daniel of Cremona dedicated to Enzio l the French version of another oriental work, the book of Yatrib, Gatriph, or Tarif , in seventy -five chapters, which he declared had first been compiled in Persian and then turned into Latin. 2 It is not stated that Frederick II had any connexion with the Latin translation, but the similarity of the two treatises and the date of the French version make it likely that the Latin text of Yatrib was also due to the emperor's interest in the oriental literature of falconry. Yatrib, whose favourite bird is the sparrow- hawk, gives a mixture of prescriptions and practical maxims, certain of which are attributed to the Great Khan (' Chaycham rex Parthorum ') and to ' Bulchassem ', who may have been the author of the Arabic text (c. 1200). 3 This manual does not appear to have furnished material for the De Arte. 3. Taken as a whole, the De Arte gives the impression of being based far less upon books than upon observation and experience, on the part either of the author or his immediate informants. 4 Frederick's eager desire to learn appears from his inquiries of the Arabs both while he was in the East and later : Nos quando transivimus mare vidimus quod ipsi Arabes utebantur capello in hac arte. Reges namque Arabum mittebant ad nos falco- narios suos peritiores in hac arte cum multis modis falconum, preterea 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. 5 It will be noted here that the emperor not only watched the Saracen falconers, but tried their methods himself and improved on them, just as he himself tested the hatching of eggs by the sun's heat in Apulia. 6 In the following unpublished passages we see the same spirit of observation applied to the nests of cuckoos and vultures, to the evidence of intelligence in ducks and cranes, and to the popular fable of the hatching of barnacle 1 A Latin work on falconry seems also to have been dedicated to Enzio as king of Torres and Gallura, ' principi nostro excellentissimo E. Turrensi ', according to a manuscript of Clare College, Cambridge (MS. 15, fo. 185) : James, Catalogue, p. 33. Enzio seems to have used this title interchangeably with that of king of Sardinia : E. Besta, La Sardegna medioevale (Palermo, 1908), i. 207 f. 2 The French translation is found at St. Mark's in the same manuscript with Moamyn (see Ciampoli, Codici Francesi,ip. 113), and the Latin texts also occur together in MS. Angelica 1461, which I have used. 8 Werth, xii. 173. On falconry at the court of the Great Khan, see Marco Polo, ed. Yule, i. 402-7. 4 Cf . Theodore's preface to Moamyn, supra : ' que sapientium solertia adinvenit per experimentum.' 6 MS. M, fo. 104V; MS. B, p. 258, ed. Schneider, pp. 162 f. « Supra, p. 342.
