A Survey of Meteoric Activity over Spain during the Eighth Fifteenth Centuries

Abstract

The lack of astronomical observations from medieval and early modern Spanish sources is a constant in the records of solar eclipses, meteors, and other celestial phenomena. This may be partially explained by the absence of a documentary corpus similar to the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, for example, that scholars may use for conducting a systematic search of such records; the problems increase by the presence of four different vernacular languages in the peninsula: Castilian, Catalan, Basque, and Galician, together with some other minority languages, to which Latin and Arabic must be added for historical research purposes. Currently, scientific literature records few medieval Spanish astronomical accounts, and most of them are contained in wider Arab surveys or they come from the best-known annals and chronicles. Our article intends to fill this gap partially in the issue of meteoritic activity. We present a survey of meteors, bolides, and meteor storms observed in Spain in the eighth-fourteenth centuries. Most of them have not been previously published and come from local or minor sources, but for the sake of completeness, we have included some records already mentioned by other authors.