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Among the illustrious tombs and cenotaphs in the archbasilica of St John Lateran, there is a Neo-Classical, 17th-century monument, that retains the text of a much earlier epitaph, inscribed in stark, Latin capitals. It opens:

“At the trumpet-call, this place in the world will give up the limbs of the buried Sylvester to the coming Lord.”

No limbs are actually interred here any more. In 1308 the Cathedral was destroyed in a fire, and the charred bones of the popes could no longer be differentiated, so they were placed together in a communal ossuary. But still, it is said that sometimes the restless bones of Pope Sylvester II will rattle, and the surface of the epitaph will become wet, as if the stone is sweating. And these signs warn of the imminent death of the Pope. 

We don’t know much about the background of Gerbert, who would eventually be remembered in this oozing epitaph. He seems to have been born some time between 938 and 950, and was presumably a native of the Cantal region, in the Auvergne in South-Central France. It’s a rugged, rural land, remote enough that the continual warfare of the early Middle Ages seems to have largely passed it by. It is now, and was then, a land of farmers and cheesemakers, of dramatic landscapes and harsh winters, where arable land in the foothills and the valleys gives way to steep cattle pastures, rising to a network of pointed ridges at the centre, the remnants of a vast ancient volcano. 

Gerbert’s family were obscure - in fact they were so obscure that nobody knows anything about them at all. We don’t know what their names were or what their jobs were or where they lived (except it was presumably somewhere in this mountainous backwater). 

What we do know is that Gerbert was educated in the Benedictine Abbey of Aurillac, at the foot of the Cantal mountains, the most important settlement in the area. Pretty much all of Western Europe’s education system at the time was run by monasteries and by cathedral schools. It was both a charitable work and a way of training up the next generation of monks. If you wanted a boy to learn to read, you’d have had to send him to a monastery.

Gerbert would have entered the monastery as an oblate - effectively a sort of trainee monk. We don’t know the details of when Gerbert specifically entered the monastery, but a typical age for a boy entering a monastery as an oblate at the time would have been about 5 to 10 years old. And then, generally the expectation was that that was where he would spend the rest of his life, pledged in perpetuity to the monastery. It would be a few years before he was ready to take full monastic vows, but his head would have been shaved, and he would have been dressed in a child-sized habit. 

And he’d have had to live pretty much like the adult monks, with his daily routine strictly prescribed by the Rule of St Benedict. He’d have prayed with the rest of the monks at several specific times throughout the day and the night, and the oblates would have had monks constantly watching them to make sure they were behaving themselves. And if they didn’t, then beatings were standard practice and actually explicitly authorised by the Rule of St Benedict (although interestingly there seems to have been a general consensus even in the Middle Ages that this should ideally be a punishment of last resort after persuasion had failed, and this was a time when beating children was completely normal absolutely everywhere, so if anything it’s actually quite possible that monastic oblates were subjected to significantly less violence on average than they would have been in the outside world).

And perhaps most importantly of all, Gerbert would have learned. He’d have learned the practicalities of being a monk - the rule of St Benedict, and how to sing the huge repertoire of chants covering the whole ecclesiastical calendar. Of course he’d have studied the Bible, and the writings of the church fathers. But the rest of his studies would have been based on a framework called the trivium - the ‘three ways’ - that is, grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Obviously he’d first have had to learn to read, and write, and then for he’d have to become fluent in Latin - the language in which the Catholic church and basically all of Western Christian intellectual life operated. This is what was meant by the ‘grammar’ part of the trivium. He’d have had vocabulary and declensions and conjugations drilled into him by rote, before he could move on to actually reading classical texts. 

The late Roman writer Donatus would have been important here. He wrote two particularly important texts on Latin grammar - the Ars Minor (the “lesser art”), and the Ars Major (the “greater art”). Gerbert would probably have started with the first one, which was a more basic grammar textbook, written in a sort of question-and-answer form that was intended to be easy to memorise (and there would have been a lot of memorisation going on. Books were rare, valuable items that had to be copied out by hand in expensive ink on expensive parchment. It wasn’t like you could just keep a copy on hand for when you needed to look something up.)

There would have been more up-to-date resources too. The Anglo-Saxon monk Aelfric of Eynsham wrote a text like this, in about this era (or actually about 990, so a few decades later), aimed at children studying in monasteries. It consists of a simple Latin dialogue between a teacher and a few students, roleplaying as people in various professions in order to get in a good range of vocabulary about things that went on outside a monastery.

Consider the opening, where the first student is in character simply as a student, which also gives an idea of some of the teaching methods involved (although it’s quite possibly exaggerated for comic effect): 

“Us boys beg you, master, to teach us to speak Latin right, because we’re ignorant and we speak badly.”

“What do you want to speak about?”

“What do we care what we talk about? As long as our speech is correct and useful, not silly or rude.”

“Would you like to be flogged while you’re learning?”

“It’s better to be flogged so we can learn than to be ignorant; but we know you’re gentle and won’t want to beat us unless we make you.”

“I ask you, what will you say to me? What do you do for work?”

“I’m training to be a monk, and every day I sing the seven services with the brothers, and I’m busy with reading and singing; but in the meantime I still want to learn to talk in the Latin language.”

“What do these friends of yours know?”

“Some are ploughmen, some shepherds, and some cowherds, also some hunters, some fishermen, some bird-catchers, some merchants, some cobblers, some salt-merchants, some millers.”

As for logic, which was important for a monk to understand if he wanted to engage with Christian theology on a serious intellectual level, there was Aristotle. All the way back in Ancient Greece, Aristotle had essentially set up the basics of formal logic as we know it, most famously defining the concept of a syllogism - that is, an argument where you set out several premises and a conclusion, and if all the premises are true, and the argument is valid, then the conclusion must also be true. The problem was, that at this point nobody in the Christian West actually had access to the original works of Aristotle. Instead, they were mostly reliant on Boethius.

Boethius lived in the 6th Century, in Rome, when it was ruled by the Ostrogoths, right on the tail end of Classical Civilisation in the West. The fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 is often considered to mark the boundary between Classical Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, but obviously nobody had told Boethius because he, a Roman Senator, remained very much an intellectual product of the Classical world, and he devoted much of his career (outside of being a senator) to studying Aristotle, producing a whole series of translations and commentaries on various bits of Aristotle’s work, himself heavily influenced by earlier Roman commentaries on Aristotle, especially by the 3rd Century Neoplatonist Porphyry of Tyre. Unfortunately a promising career was cut short when he fell out with the Ostrogothic King Theodoric, and was executed. But it was while he was awaiting execution that he wrote his best-known work, the Consolation of Philosophy, where he describes being visited by a personification of Philosophy, who attempts to cheer him up about his impending execution by talking to him about Christian Theology in terms of the philosophy of Plato. 

And Boethius, by virtue of living right on the boundary between Antiquity and the Middle Ages, was for several hundred years the West’s main intellectual point of contact between these two eras. And if he’d lived longer, Early Medieval Western Europe would probably have had access to a lot more of Aristotle’s work, translated into Latin and with helpful commentaries, than they had.

And the third component of the trivium was rhetoric. Obviously this was important for a priest to learn if they wanted to be able to give informative, memorable and persuasive sermons. Gerbert would have studied speeches and poetry from various eminent Romans, including Pagans like Cicero and Cato, and Christians like Augustine who specifically applied Roman rhetorical arts to Christian subject matter. 

Gerbert, taught by a monk called Raimund, seems to have excelled at all this. 

The trivium was the more basic level of Medieval education (hence the word ‘trivial’). The next step for Gerbert the quadrivium - the four ways: Music, Astronomy, Geometry and Arithmetic

Much like the Trivium, the quadrivium in the West at this point was largely based on a small fraction of the output of the ancient Greeks that had survived through translations and commentaries by Romans (most importantly, of course, Boethius). 

The importance of this set of disciplines ultimately goes all the way back to Pythagoras. This eccentric thinker from Archaic Greece ended up being credited with all sorts of ideas, among them that the universe was constructed around basic mathematical principles, and that these were especially reflected in the ratios of string lengths that produced harmonious combinations of notes. Pythagoreans believed in the music of the spheres - music produced by the spheres in which the planets orbit the Earth, each of the seven spheres producing a different note. In the Pythagorean philosophy that dominated Ancient Greek and Roman intellectual life, and that Boethius transmitted to the Medieval West,  Arithmetic, Geometry, Music and Astronomy were all related and all expressed the fundamental mathematical relationships on which the universe was built.

In the Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius describes the study of the Quadrivium as a sort of progression from the Physical world to God, starting with Music, then astronomy, geometry, and finally Arithmetic, the purest discipline of all the Arts. 

Let’s start with Music.

At a practical level, Gerbert would have been quite intensively trained in singing from the moment he entered the monastery as a child. After all, singing their multiple daily services, with all sorts of different chants over the course of the liturgical year, was one of the main parts of a monk’s job. 

The study of music as part of the quadrivium, though, was very different. This was focused on the role of music in Pythagorean philosophy (as interpreted mostly by late Roman writers, especially, of course, Boethius), and of music as an expression of the mathematical relationships that underlie the whole of observable reality. 

Next up: Astronomy.

In later periods, the study of astronomy in the west would be heavily tied up with astrology, but at this point there was surprisingly little. Most of what had survived of the intellectual output of Ancient Greece and Rome had been preserved by Roman Christian writers, and they’d regarded it as a pagan superstition. There do seem to have been little bits of astrological material floating around, but it certainly wouldn’t have been a standard part of a monastic education in the quadrivium.

The main purpose of astronomy for a monk at this time would have been timekeeping. Medieval monks kept to an extremely rigid daily routine, with services having to be held at precise times of day, and in the days before mechanical clocks this would have depended largely on astronomical observations. You can use a sundial during the day, but someone’s still got to understand the motion of the sun in order to set it up. And at night you had to rely on looking at the stars. Water clocks, using a constant flow of water to track time, existed, but they were far from ubiquitous, and besides, you needed to know what time it was when the water started flowing. You also had to keep track of the seasons and - very importantly for a Medieval monk - calculate the date of Easter. This depended on understanding the two completely unrelated cycles of the sun and the moon, and how they related to the Julian Calendar, so you could determine the date for any given year of the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox. And it was complicated enough to form an entire subdiscipline of early medieval applied mathematics known as computus.

Related calculating the date of Easter was an effort to understand the motion of the Sun and the planets relative to the stars of the zodiac through the year. Ptolemy’s Almagest, often considered the most important work on astronomy from antiquity, didn’t exist in Latin yet. This would form the basis of the Ptolemaic Astronomy that would persist until Galileo’s day, with a complicated arrangement of planets moving in various simultaneous circles around various arbitrary points to account for the fact that the naive assumption that the Sun, Moon and planets are all orbiting the Earth in perfect circles at uniform speeds doesn’t really stand up to precise observation.

But apart from the Almagest, bits of ancient Greek astronomy actually had survived, especially in the form of Plato’s dialogue Timaeus, which focuses on the creation of the world, and which the 4th-Century philosopher Calcidius had translated into Latin with extensive commentaries.

Plato in Timaeus describes how the creator arranged the planets in seven spheres with sizes and speeds dictated by the ratios of string length that Pythagoras had worked out make a musical scale. Calcidius’ commentary explains quite a lot of astronomy as understood at the time, which was significantly more advanced than it was when Plato wrote Timaeus, although Calcidius isn’t as sophisticated as Ptolemy. He does mention, though, how the Sun doesn’t move at a constant speed through the zodiac, and how the planets sometimes appear to go backwards, and he attempts to explain it by adding epicycles - or smaller circles that the sun and the planets move in while they’re going round in their big circles. But at least for the purposes of Computus, the monks of the early middle ages generally treated the Sun’s motion through the zodiac as if it was uniform.

Third: Geometry.

As in subsequent centuries, the geometry being taught in the Latin West was largely derived from the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid, and his textbook, the Elements. The problem was, like with Aristotle, that very little of Euclid’s Elements actually survived in the Latin West at this point. Basically all they had were a few fragments that had been translated by who else but Boethius, including a load of basic geometrical theorems, and even proofs for a few of them. At an unclear time, this had been assembled into a book alongside bits from Roman land-surveying manuals, known as Geometry I, by pseudo-Boethius. 

Calcidius’s commentary on Timaeus was also important here. The astronomy Calcidius describes is backed up by a whole range of detailed diagrams, not just of the astronomical phenomena themselves, but also of the geometrical principles that you needed to understand them.

And then that brings us to Arithmetic, the study of pure number, that Boethius presented as the highest of the Liberal Arts, and the closest to God. 

Boethius’s work on arithmetic drew heavily on the work of the 1st-2nd-Century Syrian-Greek mathematician Nicomachus of Gerasa. Again it was quite different to what you might learn if you were learning arithmetic today. There wasn’t much on things like actual calculation methods, and it was more to do with the properties of numbers, and sequences of numbers, ratios, that sort of thing. Arithmetic being the purest discipline of the quadrivium also meant it was the most fundamental, and these principles to do with numbers, sequences and ratios, were understood to be the theoretical basis behind music, geometry and astronomy. 

And in all these things, Gerbert proved to be a brilliant scholar, and he wanted more than this little provincial monastery could give him.

So one night he fled, and headed south, crossing the high passes of the Pyrenees, through the turbulent borderlands of the Hispanic Marches, the lawless frontier between two civilisations, devastated by almost three centuries of war, and into the Caliphate of Cordoba, heading south still further across the dry, windy Meseta, between rugged Sierras to the great ancient city of Seville, where he found a philosopher to be his guide to knowledge far deeper than anything that could be found in the library of Aurillac. In the words of the 12th-Century chronicler William of Malmesbury:

“There he learned what the song and flight of birds portended, there he learned to summon ghostly forms from hell; there he learned everything that is either harmful or healthful that has been discovered by human curiosity.”

But there was one book of occult mysteries that this philosopher guarded jealously. And it became Gerbert’s obsession. He begged and pleaded with the philosopher to let him see it, but to no avail. Until, after a night of heavy drinking, the philosopher fell asleep, and Gerbert, with the aid of the Philosopher’s daughter, took the book from under his teacher’s pillow.

Under cover of darkness, Gerbert saddled his horse, and fled the city, riding as fast as his horse could carry him, to get a head start before dawn, when the philosopher would realise his book was gone.

But the philosopher had awoken almost immediately, and gazed up at the stars, reading the heavens for a sign of which road the thief had taken. He set out at once in pursuit. But Gerbert had learned well from his master, and he read in the stars that his pursuer was close behind. And he hid, beneath a bridge. Clinging to the beams, suspended above the swirling river, neither on land nor in water, a space beyond the reach of occult powers. 

So the Philosopher lost his trail. He stared into the glittering firmament, trying in vain to discern a sign of where the thief had taken his precious book, and he returned to Seville empty handed. Gerbert continued, moving quickly to make the most of his head start, until he reached the sea. And now he looked at the stars again. The Philosopher had found him once more, and was pursuing again. And Gerbert could go no further with the sea in front of him. 

But again he called upon the skills he had learned in Seville. That night, in a lonely spot outside the town, a stretch of dismal shoreline beyond the sight of mortal eyes, he marked symbols in the sand, and muttered incantations. And then before him stood none other than the Devil himself. 

Simply by stealing the book, Gerbert reasoned, his soul was already doomed. What was there to lose? He promised his immortal soul if he could only be delivered from his pursuer and allowed to master the secrets contained in the book.

So he was lifted into the air, hurtling at tremendous speed past the jagged rocks of the shore, trying not to look down at the moonlight glinting on the dark water far below, until his feet touched the damp sand beyond the sea. As the sun began to rise, he clutched the Philosopher’s grimoire tightly to his chest, ready to become a master of the secrets hidden within.

Or at least, that’s the story we get from William of Malmesbury.

Anyway, back to Aurillac.

The first definite date we know in Gerbert’s life is 967. The fact that nobody has any idea when he was born obviously means nobody has any idea how old he was, and it’s not completely clear where he was at with his education. The range of potential dates of birth makes him 16 at the youngest and 29 at the oldest. I guess whether you want to picture a teenage boy or a man in his late 20s or anything in between is basically up to you. But 967 was when a visitor came to the abbey from the South, from the Mediterranean coast, from the very edge of Christendom. This was Borrell II, Count of Barcelona.

This was a chance for Gerbert to move up in the world. Aurillac was a perfectly respectable abbey, but a brilliant mind like Gerbert’s needed more than that. The abbot would have known this, Gerbert would have known this, and Borrell would have known this. The very largest monasteries in this era - places like Bobbio, Reichenau, Lorsch or Sankt Gallen - would have had a few hundred books in their libraries, but somewhere like Aurillac would have had far fewer - we’re talking tens of books, rather than hundreds. If you wanted to make it as a 10th-Century intellectual, you had to travel. 

This would probably have been the first time Gerbert left the monastery since he entered it as a child, and was almost certainly the first time in his life he’d travelled outside a small patch of South-Central France.

Gerbert presumably set out Southwards with Borrell and his entourage, descending from the hills of Auvergne to the plains of the Garonne, and then to the Mediterranean coast, where the old Roman road twisted round the edge of the Pyrenees, balanced precariously above the bright blue waters. 

Maybe he went all the way to Barcelona, maybe he didn’t. But at some point, he left the Mediterranean behind and travelled west, towards the southern slopes of the Pyrenees, to the cathedral city of Vic, where the Bishop, Hatto, was a friend of Borrell. Hatto was a learned man, and it was with him that Borrell planned for Gerbert to continue his studies. 

Catalonia was an interesting place at this time, and to see why I’ll talk a bit about its history for the previous 256 years. In 711, in a natural next step after the Umayyad Caliphate’s rapid expansion across North Africa, the Umayyad General Tariq ibn Ziyad, and a few thousand North African troops, crossed the sea, and landed at a narrow peninsula dominated by a mountain that became known as the Mountain of Tariq - in Arabic, Jabal Tariq, which would end up as Gibraltar. Fortunately for Tariq, the Visigothic King Roderic was already struggling to hold his Kingdom together, and had little chance of assembling a large, well-equipped army, even for a struggle as existential as this, and within 10 years  all that was left of the Visigothic Kingdom was a small strip on the wet, mountainous North Coast, protected by the Cantabrian Mountains. The Umayyad Caliphate controlled territory as far north as Septimania on the Mediterranean Coast of France, and was launching expeditions deep into the Frankish Kingdom and the Duchy of Aquitaine. In 732, an Umayyad army made it as far north as Poitiers, but were repelled by a Frankish army led by Charles Martel in the Battle of Tours.

This marked a high point of Umayyad expansion into Europe, and over the next few decades, the Franks under Charles Martel, and then his son, Pepin the Short, would drive the Umayyads out of Gaul.

Meanwhile the Caliphate was having its own problems. In 750, the Abbasid dynasty had overthrown the Umayyads, and massacred most of the royal family. But Abd Al-Rahman, the grandson of a previous Umayyad Caliph, managed to slip past the Abbasids and avoid the bloodbath. And, after a perilous flight across Africa, he reached the Pillars of Hercules like Tariq had 45 years earlier and like Tariq, he took advantage of the fact that Spain was a gigantic tangled mess of rival factions fighting for power, and played them off against each other to secure control of the place. Cordoba was now the centre of its own independent Emirate. Abd Al-Rahman was a long way from the Abbasid centre of power in Baghdad, and he had his own army at his disposal. There wasn’t much the Abbasids could do about him.

But all this chaos meant the Emirate of Cordoba couldn’t devote as much energy as they needed to to defending their Northern frontier, and Narbonne, the capital of Umayyad Septimania, fell to Pepin in 759. Pepin’s son, called Charles like his grandfather (who would later end up being crowned Emperor, and known to history as Charles the Great, or Charles le Magne in French), expanded Frankish territory beyond the Pyrenees, capturing Barcelona in 801.

This buffer region south of the Pyrenees, the Spanish March, had been left devastated by decades of war, and much of the rural population had simply left. This meant a lot of land was going spare, and who better to exploit it than monks. A whole series of monasteries were built in the Pyrenean valleys of Catalonia, with the monks bringing in peasants to work the land and repopulate it.

As the border between Christendom and the Dar ul-Islam moved further south, and became more stable, by the second half of the 9th Century it became safe to rebuild the old Visigothic Cathedral of Vic, that had been destroyed during the Moorish invasion.

And as the area recovered from the devastation of war, its position on the frontier of Christendom came to have some advantages.

In the West (or in fact I should probably specify the Christian West, since Al-Andalus was mostly further West than West Francia), as you probably noticed from my description of a monastic education, the transmission of texts from Ancient Greece had been erratic at best. What remained was a sparse, fragmentary and somewhat random selection of texts that had been translated into Latin and commented on by a handful of late Roman authors (mostly Boethius). 

In the Islamic world, though, the situation was a bit different. The Abbasid Caliphate had among its subjects Syriac Christians who could read Greek, and they had access to Greek manuscripts that had survived in the Greek-speaking eastern half of the Roman Empire. And the Abbasid Caliphs sponsored Arabic translations of a huge number of Greek texts on philosophy, mathematics, medicine, astronomy, etc. 

As well as Greece, the Abbasid Caliphate also had access to another great ancient mathematical civilisation, on the Eastern edge of their domain: India. 

Indian intellectual culture was hugely influential on the Abbasids - after all, Caliph Al-Mansur’s vizier, Khalid ibn Barmak, who’d also designed his new purpose-built capital of Baghdad, was the son of the guardian of the great Buddhist monastery of Naw Bahar, near Balkh in what’s now Northern Afghanistan, a major centre of Buddhist scholarship. 

All this stuff being translated from Greek, Sanskrit, Persian, and Syriac into Arabic led to an explosion of mathematical output, perhaps most remarkably of all from Al-Khwarizmi, a Central Asian who developed a set of methods for solving equations that he outlined in his Concise Book of Calculation by Restoration and Balancing - in Arabic al-Kitab al-Mukhtasar fi Hisab al-Jabr wal-Muqabalah, or al-Jabr, Latinised as algebra for short. In fact, this man’s work became so closely associated with the very concept of following a systematic procedure to solve a maths problem that a Latin rendering of his name gives us the word algorithm. 

The vast expanse of Islamic civilisation meant this knowledge from the East could spread rapidly, the entire length of the Mediterranean, all the way to distant Andalusia. 

And from there, by the time Gerbert reached Vic, bits of this knowledge were just starting to drift northwards, with travellers - likely mostly Andalusian Christians, who still made up about half the population of Al-Andalus - moving back and forth between the two civilisations.

This was a time when books only existed if someone had copied them out by hand, and could only move at the speed of the fastest ship or the fastest horse. And it was also the time when the Cathedrals and monasteries of Catalonia were developing scriptoria - where monks would do the laborious work of copying out by hand whatever manuscripts found their way to the monastery. 

Gerbert d’Aurillac spent his time in Catalonia both in Vic and 20 miles or so further up the river Ter, at the monastery of Ripoll, in the shadow of the Pyrenees. And presumably this was where Gerbert first heard about two important pieces of knowledge filtering through from the Islamic world, which make their first appearances in Western Christendom in the Hispanic Marches at about this time, and that became important parts of Gerbert’s future career and his strange reputation. 

But that can wait for the next episode. You’ve been listening to Science: A Peculiar History. You can find the podcast almost anywhere you get podcasts, or at scienceapeculiarhistory.co.uk. Remember to follow the podcast on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Bluesky. The website also has episode transcripts, as well as images and sources for the earlier episodes. If you have any questions comments, corrections or suggestions, you can email admin@scienceapeculiarhistory.co.uk, message any of the social media channels, or use the contact form on the website.