Constantine the African
He first arrived in Italy in the coastal town of Salerno, home of the Schola Medica Salernitana, where his work attracted attention from the local Lombard and Norman rulers.
According to Peter, Constantine traveled through Babylon, India, and Ethiopia, where he became versed in science, before coming to Monte Cassino as a refugee from peers in Carthage jealous of his knowledge.
[4] Still, later historians such as Salvatore de Renzi and Charles Daremberg, curator of the National Library in Paris, and Leclerc, author of History of Arab Medicine, relied on this account.
[5] German medical historian Karl Sudhoff created his Berber-Islamic thesis after discovering new and important documents touching on Constantine's life and religion in the village of La Trinità della Cava [citation needed], which he published in the journal Archeion in 1922.
As Constantine spoke no Italian, a North African doctor named Abbas of Curiat, from an island lying off the city of Mahdia in Ifriqiya (modern-day Tunisia), became his interpreter.
Suffering from an illness, he took refuge with the king's brother Gusulf, where he noted that Abbas did not ask for the usual bottle of urine, and the doctor who came to examine him was inexperienced.
En route to Salerno he passed by the coast of Lucania by boat, where north of the Gulf of Polycastro a storm damaged some manuscripts, including the first three parts of the books of Ali Ibn Abbas Al Majoussi, which were lost.
North Africa exported olive oil, wax, leather, wool and derivatives, and imported wheat in famine years, and Islam did not prohibit trade with Christian countries.
Two English translations of De Coitu are readily available: The preface to Constantine's Pantegni is also available: In his introduction of the complete works of Ambroise Pare, here what Doctor Malgaigne writes: "Constantine was born in Carthage and taken with an ardent desire to learn all sciences he went to Babylonia, learned grammar, logic, physics (medicine), geometry, arithmetic, mathematics, astronomy, necromancy, and music.
