384 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE 1 154 and superior to any previous medieval geography either Christian or Arabian. The employment of Edrisi by Roger shows us that the Church was not the sole center and source of learning. We p . j have also seen Constantinus Africanus at the patronage court of the Norman Robert Guiscard. Wil- o earning ^ m ^ Conches, too, had found a patron in Geoffrey Plantagenet, the father of Henry II of England, and himself Duke of Normandy as well as Count of Anjou; and Adelard of Bath in 11 30 received a sum of money from the government of Henry I of England. Roger's patronage of learning in Sicily was repeated there in the first half of the thirteenth century by the cultured court of the Emperor Frederick II, of whose scientific curiosity strange tales were circulated by credulous chroniclers. One such story was to this effect: Frederick gave two men a hearty dinner, after which one of them was made to take a nap and the other to go hunting. Both were then put to death and their insides examined with a view to learning whether sleep or exercise immediately after a meal was more favorable to digestion. Frederick's court astrologer was Michael Scot, a native of the British Isles who did much to promote the translation of Aristotle and other learned writings from Arabic into Latin, and who sooner or later won a popular reputation as a magician. Another monarch of the thirteenth century famed for his own erudition as well as his patronage of learning was Alfonso the Wise of Castile (1252-1284). In both Sicily and the Spanish peninsula in the latter half of the twelfth and the early years of the thirteenth century Translations numei *o us translators were engaged in turning from the into Latin from Arabic the treasures of Greek science and philosophy which the Arabs had preserved and also many writings of the Arabs themselves. As such works became available for Latin readers, they greatly increased the amount of facts and theories current, broadened the outlook of the learned world, and stimulated further that intellectual curiosity and that fondness for dis- cussion and disputation which were already very much in
