When these translations were coming to England, travellers were bringing Greek books directly from the East. A doctor of medicine named William returned to Paris from Constantinople in 1167, carrying with him “many precious Greek codices.”[531] About 1209 a Latin translation of Aristotle’s _Physics_ or _Metaphysics_ was made from a Greek manuscript brought straight from Constantinople. Some of these few importations were certainly destroyed at once, probably all were, for Aristotle was proscribed in Paris in the following year, and again in 1215, at the very time when Michael the Scot was procuring versions in another direction, at Toledo.[532] Not until mid-thirteenth century was the ban wholly removed.
For a time, owing to the capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders, intercourse between East and West had become far freer than it had been for centuries (1203-61). Certain Greek philosophers of learned mien came to England about 1202, but did not stay; and some Armenians, among them a bishop, visited St. Albans. Whether they or Nicholas the Greek, clerk to the abbot of that monastery, brought books with them we do not know; Nicholas, at any rate, seems to have assisted Grosseteste in his Greek studies.[533] John of Basingstoke, Grosseteste’s archdeacon, carried Greek manuscripts--many valuable manuscripts, we are told--from Athens, whither Grosseteste had sent him. The bishop himself imported books to this country, probably from Sicily and South Italy.[534] He had a copy of Suidas’ _Lexicon_, possibly the earliest copy brought to the West. The _Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs_ was also in Grosseteste’s possession: the manuscript was brought home by John of Basingstoke, and still exists in the Cambridge University Library.[535] These forged _Testaments_ were translated by Nicholas the Greek, and as no fewer than thirty-one copies of the Latin version still remain they must have had a good circulation.[536] Possibly the Greek Octateuch (Genesis to Ruth), now in the Bodleian Library, was imported into this country by Grosseteste or by somebody for him; at one time the manuscript was in the library of Christ Church, Canterbury.[537] Among other Greek books which Grosseteste used and translated, or had translated under his direction, were the Epistles of St. Ignatius, a Greek romance of Asenath, the Egyptian wife of the patriarch Joseph, and some writings of Dionysius the Areopagite. At Ramsey, where the bishop’s influence may be suspected, Prior Gregory (_fl._ 1290) owned a Græco-Latin psalter, still extant.[538] Possibly all the importations were of similar character, and the number of them cannot have been great or we should have heard more of them.