slew on Easter night for professing the true faith. To Leander succeeded Isidore,[1] celebrated for learning and sanctity, whose body purchased, for its weight in gold, Aldefonsus king of Gallicia in our times conveyed to Toledo. The Saracens, who had subjugated the Goths, being conquered in their turn by Charles the Great, lost Gallicia and Lusitania, the largest provinces of Spain; but to this day they possess the southern parts. As the Christians esteem Toledo, so do they hold Hispalis, which in common they call Seville, to be the capital of the kingdom; there practising divinations and incantations, after the usual mode of that nation. Gerbert then, as I have related, coming among these people, satisfied his desires. There he surpassed Ptolemy with the astrolabe,[2] and Alcandraeus in astronomy, and Julius Firmicus in judicial astrology; there he learned what the singing and the flight of birds portended; there he acquired the art of calling up spirits from hell: in short, whatever, hurtful or salutary, human curiosity has discovered. There is no necessity to speak of his progress in the lawful sciences of arithmetic and astronomy, music and geometry, which he imbibed so thoroughly as to show they were beneath his talents, and which, with great perseverance, he revived in Gaul, here they had for a long time been wholly obsolete. Being certainly the first who seized on the abacus[3] from the Saracens,
- ↑ Isidore was bishop of Seville in the sixth century.
- ↑ An instrument for making celestial observations. The reader who is conversant with the Arabian Nights' Entertainments will remember its being frequently mentioned in that amusing book.
- ↑ The abacus was a counting table: here it seems used metaphorically for arithmetic, Gerbert having written a treatise on arithmetic with that title. The authors of the Hist. Litt. de la France, t. vi. understand him literally, as stealing a book containing the principles of the science, and then confound this supposed book with the conjuring treatise mentioned below. They also seem very much displeased with Malmesbury for relating these
father with the royal diadem and the principality of Boetica, and contracted an alliance with Ingundis, daughter of Sigebert, king of Austrasia. Ingundis was persecuted, and at length killed by her husband's mother, on account of her Catholic faith. Leander, archbishop of Seville, easily persuaded Hermenegild to resent the treatment of his bride, and assisted him in an attempt to dethrone his father. Hermenegild was taken and sentenced to death for his rebellion. The inflexible constancy, with which he refused to accept the Arian communion, from which he had been converted by Leander, as the price of his safety, procured for him the honour of being enrolled among the saints of the Romish church.—Hardy.
