Sixteen: AD 1487--Leonardo in the East

The earliest documents related to the employment of Leonardo da Vinci by Ludovico Sforza, the future Duke of Milan, are from 1487. From 1483 until August of 1487, da Vinci was virtually missing from the stage of history. Since 1487 was one of those years that marked the return of the Comet that we have been at such pains to monitor in the current work, in this case referred to generically, if at all, as "the Comet of 1487," it is interesting to note that da Vinci's notebook indicates a trip to the Near East, notably Syria and Armenia (in Asia Minor), and that his trip was supposedly accompanied by geophysical calamities that do not appear anywhere else in the history of the region, except perhaps in the manuscript of Dshelal eddin Sayouthy (As-Soyuti Jelal'ed-Din) on the history of earthquakes, so that we might suspect, at least at first, that Leonardo was imagining what might have happened, or should have happened, if the comet had produced the effects it had been known to have produced in the ancient world. In the words of the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1911,

The first definite documentary evidence of Leonardo's employments at Milan dates from 1487. Some biographers have supposed that the interval, or part of it, between 1483 and that date was occupied by travels in the East. The grounds of the supposition are some drafts occurring among his MSS. of a letter addressed to the diodario or diwâdar of Syria, lieutenant of the sultan of Babylon (Babylon meaning according to a usage of that time Cairo). In these drafts Leonardo describes in the first person, with sketches, a traveler's strange experiences in Egypt, Cyprus, Constantinople, the Cilician coasts about Mount Taurus and Armenia. He relates the rise and persecution of a prophet and preacher, the catastrophe of a falling mountain and submergence of a great city, followed by a general inundation, and the claim of the prophet to have foretold these disasters; adding physical descriptions of the Euphrates River ....

This complex of occurrences resembles those earlier ones with which, by now, the reader should be familiar, and will become even more recognizable as we investigate the details of these and other related events.

Quoting from Leonardo's actual notebooks, as translated by Jean Paul Richter in 1888, we have the following:

The recent disaster in our northern parts which I am certain will terrify not you alone but the whole world, which shall be related to you in due order, showing first the effect and then the cause. [....]¹ Finding myself in this part of Armenia to carry into effect with due love and care the task for which you sent me; and to make a beginning in a place which seemed to me to be most to our purpose, I entered into the city Calendrafy, near to our frontiers. This city is situated at the base of that part of the Taurus mountains which is divided from the Euphrates and looks towards the peaks of the great Mount Taurus to the west. These peaks are of such a height that they seem to touch the sky, and in all the world there is no part of the earth, higher than its summit, and the rays of the sun always fall upon it on its East side, four hours before day-time, and being of the whitest stone it shines resplendently and fulfils the function to these Armenians which a bright moon-light would in the midst of the darkness; and by its great height it outreaches the utmost level of the clouds by a space of four miles in a straight line. This peak is seen in many places towards the West, illuminated by the sun after its setting the third part of the night. This it is, which with you we formerly in calm weather had supposed to be a comet, appears to us in the darkness of night, to change its form, being sometimes divided in two or three parts, and sometimes long and sometimes short. And this is caused by the clouds on the horizon of the sky which interpose between part of this mountain and the sun, and by cutting off some of the solar rays the light on the mountain is intercepted by various intervals of clouds, and therefore varies in the form of its brightness.

• The praise and confession of the faith.
• The sudden inundation, to its end.
• The destruction of the city.
• The death of the people and their despair.
• The preacher's search, his release and benevolence.
• Description of the cause of this fall of the mountain.
• The mischief it did.
• Fall of snow.
• The finding of the prophet.
• His prophesy.
• The inundation of the lower portion of Eastern Armenia, the draining of which was effected by the cutting through the Taurus Mountains.
• How the new prophet showed that this destruction would happen as he had foretold.
• Description of the Taurus Mountains and the river Euphrates.
• Why the mountain shines at the top, from half to a third of the night, and looks like a comet to the inhabitants of the West after the sunset, and before day to those of the East.
• Why this comet appears of variable forms, so that it is now round and now long, and now again divided into two or three parts, and now in one piece, and when it is to be seen again.

There is a second description of these events in Leonardo's notebooks; according to Richter, penned previous to the above description and addressed to an unknown recipient. For some reason he thinks this was not the Devatdar of Syria:

... [D]uring the last few days I have been in so much trouble, fear, peril and loss, besides the miseries of the people here, that we have been envious of the dead; and certainly I do not believe that since the elements by their separation reduced the vast chaos to order, they have ever combined their force and fury to do so much mischief to man. As far as regards us here, what we have seen and gone through is such that I could not imagine that things could ever rise to such an amount of mischief, as we experienced in the space of ten hours. In the first place we were assailed and attacked by the violence and fury of the winds; to this was added the falling of great mountains of snow which filled up all this valley, thus destroying a great part of our city. And not content with this the tempest sent a sudden flood of water to submerge all the low part of this city; added to which there came a sudden rain, or rather a ruinous torrent and flood of water, sand, mud, and stones, entangled with roots, and stems and fragments of various trees; and every kind of thing flying through the air fell upon us; finally a great fire broke out, not brought by the wind, but carried as it would seem, by ten thousand devils, which completely burnt up all this neighbourhood and it has not yet ceased. And those few who remain unhurt are in such dejection and such terror that they hardly have courage to speak to each other, as if they were stunned. Having abandoned all our business, we stay here together in the ruins of some churches, men and women mingled together, small and great, just like herds of goats. The neighbours out of pity succoured us with victuals, and they had previously been our enemies. And if it had not been for certain people who succoured us with victuals, all would have died of hunger. Now you see the state we are in. And all these evils are as nothing compared with those which are promised to us shortly. I know that as a friend you will grieve for my misfortunes, as I, in former letters have shown my joy at your prosperity.

It is clear that the phenomena described by Leonardo were related to the appearance of the comet, though why he insists on ascribing the latter to an optical illusion is puzzling. Did one of the greatest minds of the Italian Renaissance really think that this supposed illusion was entirely unrelated to the massive geological and meteorological effects he describes? Or perhaps he understood the connection but believed that the comet was an atmospheric phenomenon, a belief passed down from Aristotle and not disproved until 1577, when Tycho Brahe demonstrated that comets were farther from earth than the moon, though Leonardo's description is a distortion of even the Aristotelian belief. It was not until August of 1487 that Leonardo's name appeared in the records of Ludovico the Moor at Milan, so that we may suppose that the final stimulus for his return to Italy only occurred during the middle months of 1487 and that he had been in Asia for some years, beginning perhaps as early as 1483 or 1484. The notion that Leonardo had during those years converted to, or returned to, the religion of Mohammed has recently been reinforced by the appearance of a theory, due to one Louis Buff Parry and based upon the discovery of documents at Vinci, that his mother Caterina was originally a slave and was an Azeri from Constantinople, thus explaining his interest in the region and his easy adaptation to the local forms of address found in the letters.

¹ According to Richter there is a break here and a new beginning. ² Again according to Richter, the outline of a book that Leonardo planned to write.

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