The Hindu-Arabic Numerals c11.48

c11.48

Even if Gerbert did not bring his knowledge of the Oriental numerals from Spain, he may easily have obtained them from the marks on merchant's goods, had he been so inclined. Such knowledge was probably obtainable in various parts of Italy, though as parts of mere mercantile knowledge the forms might soon have been lost, it needing the pen of the scholar to preserve them. Trade at this time was not stagnant. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries the Slavs, for example, had very great commercial interests, their trade reaching to Kiev and Novgorod, and thence to the East. Constantinople was a great clearing-house of commerce with the Orient,¹ and the Byzantine merchants must have been entirely familiar with the various numerals of the Eastern peoples. In the eleventh century the Italian town of Amalfi established a factory² in Constantinople, and had trade relations with Antioch and Egypt. Venice, as early as the ninth century, had a valuable trade with Syria and Cairo.³ Fifty years after Gerbert died, in the time of Cnut, the Dane and the Norwegian pushed their commerce far beyond the northern seas, both by caravans through Russia to the Orient, and by their venturesome barks which sailed through the Strait of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean.¹ Only a little later, probably before 1200 A.D., a clerk in the service of Thomas à Becket, present at the latter's death, wrote a life of the martyr, to which (fortunately for our purposes) he prefixed a brief eulogy of the city of London.² This clerk, William Fitz Stephen by name, thus speaks of the British capital: