The life of Raymond Lully is so romantic that it is worth telling,
though it only touches pharmaceutical history occasionally. Born at
Palma, in the island of Majorca, in 1235, in a good position of life,
he married at the age of twenty-two, and had two sons and a daughter.
But home life was not what he desired, and he continued to live the
life of a gallant, serenading young girls, writing verses to them, and
giving balls and banquets, to the serious derangement of his fortune.
Ultimately he conceived a violent passion for a beautiful and virtuous
married woman named Ambrosia de Castello who was living at Majorca with
her husband. She, to check this libertine’s ardour, showed him her
breast, ravaged by cancer. This so afflicted him that he set himself
to study medicine with the object of discovering a cure for the cruel
disease. With the study of medicine and of alchemy he now associated
an insatiable longing for the deliverance of the world from Mohammedan
error. He renounced the world, including it would seem his wife and
children (though it is recorded that he first shared his possessions
with his wife), and went to live on a mountain in a hut which he
built with his own hands. This career, however, did not promise an
early enough extirpation of infidels, so before long Lully is found
travelling, and residing at Paris, Rome, Vienna, Genoa, Tunis, and in
other cities, preaching new crusades, importuning the Pope to establish
new orders of missionary Christians, and at intervals writing books on
medicine. He had invented a sort of mathematical scheme which in his
opinion absolutely proved the truth of Christianity, and by the use of
diagrams he hoped to convert the Saracens. His ideas are set forth,
if not explained, in his _Ars Magna_. In the course of his strange
life he visited Palestine and Cyprus, and at Naples in 1293 he made
the acquaintance of Arnold de Villanova. This learned man taught Lully
much, and found a fervent discipline in him. He was more than seventy
when, according to tradition, he travelled to London with the object
of urging on Edward III a new war against the Saracens. Edward alleged
his want of means, but Lully was prepared to meet the difficulty,
and some of the historians of the science of the period assert that
he coined a lot of gold for the purpose of the new crusade. Edward
promptly used this money for the war with France, in which he was more
interested. Disappointed and disgusted, Lully left England, and some
time after, at the age of seventy-eight, set out to visit Jerusalem.
Having accomplished that journey he visited several of the cities of
North Africa on his way back, and at Bougia, after preaching with his
usual vehemence against the Mohammedan heresy, he was stoned by the
Moors and left for dead. Some friendly merchants took his body on their
ship bound for his native Majorca. He revived, but died on the voyage
in his eightieth year, A.D. 1415. His tomb is still shown in
the church of San Francisco in the City of Palma.
[Illustration: RAYMOND LULLY.
(From a portrait in the Royal Court and State Library, Munich.)]
Raymond Lully is particularly famous in pharmaceutical history for
the general use of the aqua vitae or aqua ardens which he introduced.
He had learned the process of distilling it from wine from Arnold of
Villanova, who had himself probably acquired it from the Arab chemists
of Spain, but Lully discovered the art of concentrating the spirit
by means of carbonate of potash. Of the aqua vitae which he made he
declared that “the taste of it exceedeth all other tastes, and the
smell of it all other smells.”