In the first half of the 15th century, a Moroccan astronomer and astrologer called Abu þAbd Allah al-Baqqar wrote two books entitled Kitab al-adwar fi tasyir al-anwar (Cycles for the progression of the luminaries) and Kitab al-amtar wa l-asþar (On rains and practices). The first book, written in 821/1418, has been edited by Montse Díaz Fajardo and it contains materials of astronomical significance related to the crisis of the Andalus÷ astronomical school which dominated the Maghrib during the 13th and 14th centuries and was later replaced by the influence of Eastern z÷jes (Muhyi al-Din al-Maghribi, Ibn al-Shatir and Ulugh Beg).

The Book on Rains and Prices is purely astrological and it deals with a Western tradition of astrological meteorology entirely different from the method of weather forecasting in al-Kindi’s writings studied by G. Bos and Ch. Burnett (London, 2000). An edition of the only extant manuscript (Escorial 916) has been prepared by Chedli Guesmi and we are both occupied in writing a detailed summary and commentary of its contents.

The book is divided into four parts:

1) 1) Introduction: Science and religion on the problem of astrology. Three different attitudes on regard to astrological predictions and its orthodoxy.

2) 2) Weather forecasting as a result of the position of the superior planets according to the school of the ancient authors of the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghrib who used the so-called “method of the crosses”. This part of the work probably corresponds to the introduction in al-Andalus of a late Latin work on astrometeorology, known since the beginning of the 9th c., and al-Baqqar’s text contains a good collection of passages which derive from the same Arabic source translated by Alfonsine collaborators in the Libro de las Cruzes.

3 3) Prognostications of the weather for the whole year as a function of the displacement of Saturn through the twelve zodiacal signs. One of the main sources quoted is the otherwise unknown Lamiyya (poem ryming in l) by the 11th century astrologer Ibn al-Jayyat, a disciple of Maslama al-Majriti, who wrote the poem c. 1050. On the whole, al-Baqqar is collecting, in this part, materials from different sources and tries to show that weather forecasting cannot be based in simple criteria like the motion of Saturn through the zodiacal signs.

4) Predictions on fertility, draught, prices and rains throughout the years in agreement with universal horoscopes (al-nasabat al-kulliyya) on which there is agreement among ancient astrologers. This part is divided into three chapters: a) on meteorology and rains; b) on prices and c) on predictions (sometimes unrelated to rains and prices) based on solar and lunar eclipses.