One of the earliest manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales produced in the first decade of the fifteenth-century, known as the Ellesmere Manuscript (kept in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California) is best known for its sumptuous decoration that weaves across its pages and its delightful renderings of twenty-two pilgrims, including Chaucer the Pilgrim, that accompany the tales told on the way to Canterbury. However, it also preserves an engagement with Arabic learning, specifically judicial astrology or ‘ilm al-nujm (the ‘science of the stars’), that takes us across geographical space and time, from fourteenth century Canterbury to tenth century Fatimid Cairo: a connection that is not easily discerned at first glance.

We begin with the detail. On folio 73b of the manuscript, pages that contain the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, we find a marginal gloss at lines 701-05 that reads “in libro Mansor primo,” (in the first book of Mansor). Another similar gloss appears a little earlier (at line 609) identified as “Mansor Amphorismorum 14” (Mansor’s Aphorism 14), which is followed by an aphorism drawn from Hermes’ Centiloquium, (One Hundred Sayings) a text also translated from Arabic, and once attributed to Mansor or Almansor.¹ Combined, these references are astrological: they explain planetary positions and their meanings, including an aphorism that notes malign planets in ascendance at birth cause ugly facial marks, which may explain the Wife of Bath’s reference to ‘Martes mark upon my face’ (‘Mars’ mark upon my face’ III. 619).²

But there is more to understanding these glosses beyond what they might mean for the character of the Wife of Bath. Indeed, there is a more pressing question that needs to be asked: Who is Mansor? And why is an Arabic name, one familiar to this Muslim reader, scribbled into the margins of an extended prologue told by Chaucer’s famously feisty pilgrim? Perhaps this isn’t as mysterious as it first sounds. The reference to Mansor has been explained by Chaucer scholars for some time, most importantly in Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel’s Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales. But less attention has been paid to the significance of his name.

Mansor is a reference to the sixth Fatimid Caliph, al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah Abu Ali al-Mansur who reigned between 996 and 1021 C.E. His reign was marred by controversy, which ended abruptly when he disappeared mysteriously at the age of 36, and later biographical dictionaries paint a portrait of a capricious, tyrannical ruler. He was, however, a patron of learning. He founded the Dar al-‘ilm (‘House of Knowledge’) in 1005 C.E, a place that mirrored similar educational institutions in the classical and medieval Islamic world with learning that extended from the religious to the philosophical supported by a vast and well-stocked library.³ While a patron of such learning, he was not the author of an astrological text. The “libro Mansor” (Book of Mansor) as we find it in the Ellesmere gloss, is in fact the work of a Jewish astrologer, only known as al-Isra’ili, first identified by George Sarton in his still-illuminating volumes on an Introduction to the History of Science.⁴ Al-Isra’ili compiled a work on judicial astrology known in Arabic as Fusul fi ‘ilm al-nujm li-l- Isra’ili khadima biha l-Hakim bi-Amr Allah (Chapters on the Science of the Stars by al-Isra’ili with which he serves al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah). Little is known about the author except that his text, a loose collection of astrological aphorisms, was dedicated to al-Mansur as evinced in the reference to his caliphal title, ‘al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah’ (Ruler by the Command of God). In the twelfth century, al-Isra’ili’s text found itself in Barcelona, where it was translated into Latin in 1136 by the Italian mathematician and translator, Plato of Tivoli and his collaborator, the Catalan Jewish mathematician, Abraham bar Hiyya. But as it was translated and disseminated, it appeared with the mistaken title, Liber almansoris. As Dag Nikolaus Hasse asserts, it is likely that Plato of Tivoli gave the text the following name: Capitula stellarum oblate regi magno sarracenorum Almansor astrologo filio Abrahea Judaei (Chapters on the Stars dedicated to the Great King of the Arabs Almansor by the Astrologer Ibn Abraham Judaei) where the attribution to the Fatimid caliph as, ‘al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah’ (Ruler by the Command of God), was replaced with the Caliph’s forename, al-Mansur.⁵ Plato of Tivoli’s translation mistake stuck. As the text was copied (and it was a popular text, existing in over thirty manuscripts) Almansor or Mansor, was cemented as the author, a mistake that continued into the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when the text was equally popular and printed in over forty copies.⁶

The name Mansor, as it appears in the Ellesmere Manuscript, has an entangled history that represents the complexities of translation across two sacred languages of learning: Arabic and Latin and across three geographical and temporal locations: Fatimid Cairo in the tenth and early eleventh century, Barcelona in the twelfth century, and early fifteenth century England. But the connections do not end here. Another figure of Arabic learning who appears in the pilgrim Squire’s tale is also caught up in the life and history of the Fatimid caliph, al-Mansur. In the Squire’s unfinished romance set in the court of the Mongol king, Cambuyskan, the authority on Arabic optical mathematics, Ibn al-Haytham (965-1040) appears in a discussion on magical mirrors as ‘Alocen’ (V. 232). The historical figure, Ibn al-Haytham also worked at the court of the sixth Fatimid caliph, and, in a twist of fate that is as historically compelling as enticingly fictive, he is considered to have feigned madness and undergone a period of self-imposed exile in order to escape from the hands of al-Mansur.⁷

It is worth recognising that while Ibn al-Haytham was not astrologically-inclined in the least, judicial astrology and mathematics were intertwined subjects in both Arabic and Latin learning, present in the ways one understood the planetary positions, mapped star charts, and, indeed, predicted horoscopes. Chaucer was no stranger to this, and neither it seems was the scribe of the Ellesmere gloss, a manuscript written between 1400-1410, not long after Chaucer died in 1400, who needed to turn to the ‘libro Mansor’ in order to determine the implications of the Wife of Bath’s horoscope.

Here then, we have a Jewish astrologer, a capricious caliph, and an optical majnun all present in Chaucer’s poetry and all part of a wider network of scholarly learning that emerged in Fatimid Cairo. Both Almansor and ‘Alocen’ appear in brief entries in Correale and Hamel’s Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, but both are siloed with little or no recognition of their beings beyond their Latinized names and yet, both are connected to a tangible geographical and historical space that deserves, at the very least, acknowledging. For Chaucer and his early audience, these references are part of the fabric of learning by the ‘Arabiens in Arabik’(31-32) as he tells his son Lewis in his preface to the Treatise on an Astrolabe: learning that was present in England from the twelfth century and distilled in Chaucer’s poetry two centuries later.

Title Image: a page from the Ellesmere manuscript of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

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[1] See Ralph Hanna and Traugott Lawler ‘The Wife of Bath’s Prologue’ in Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel, Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales Vol. 2 (Cambridge: D.S Brewer, 2005) pp. 384-386. See also Shazia Jagot, ‘Almansor’ in The Chaucer Encyclopaedia eds., Richard Newhauser, Vincent Gillespie, Jessica Rosenfeld and Katie Walter (Wiley-Backwell), forthcoming.

[2] All citations from Chaucer’s works are taken from The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson 3rd edn, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), cited parenthetically in the text by fragment and line number.

[3] SeeFarhadDaftary,‘Hakembe-AmrAllah’EncylopaediaIranicaVol.11ed.Ehsan Yarshater, (Brill: Leiden, 2003), pp. 572-573. An adapted version can be found here: https://www.iis.ac.uk/encyclopaedia-articles/al-hakim-bi-amr-allah.

[4] See George Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science 3 volumes (Washington and Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1927-47).

[5] See Dag Nikolaus Hasse, Success and Suppression Arabic Sciences and Philosophy in the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), pp. 385-86.

[6] Ibid, p.385.

[7] Ibn Abī-Usaybi‘ah, ‘Ibn al-Haytham’ 14. 22.2 and for the Arabic, see ‘Ibn al-Haytham’ ed. Franak Hilloowala, Emilie Savage-Smith, Geert Jan van Gelder and Ignacio Sánchez in ‘Uyūn al-anbā fī tabaqāt al-atibbā (‘The Best Accounts of the Classes of Physicians’) ed. E. Savage-Smith, S. Swain, G.J van Gelder (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 14.22.2. Accessed here: https://doi.org/10.1163/37704_0668IbnAbiUsaibia.Tabaqatalatibba.lhom-ed-ara1.