Re: historic astronomy question
There's a big leap between deciding that the Moon "attracts" something and coming up with a concept like gravity, with the associated math on how it operates over distance.
Cyrano de Bergerac, in his fictional flights to the Moon, made use of the Moon's supposed and real attraction for various substances in some of his many unusual devices he proposed for space flight.
None of them assumed a scientific and measurable phenomenon like gravity, although methods involving balloons and rockets had quite a future.