The Toledo Translators

Toledo fell to Castile in 1085. Unusually for the period, the city's Muslim and Jewish populations were not expelled, and its libraries were not destroyed. What followed was a translation effort running from the middle of the twelfth century into the thirteenth, which moved a large body of Arabic science and philosophy into Latin.

The working method was frequently collaborative in a way that crossed every boundary the period is remembered for. A common arrangement had a Jewish or Mozarab scholar read the Arabic aloud, rendering it into Castilian vernacular, while a Latin cleric wrote the Latin from the spoken version. Two languages of transit between the source and the target.

Gerard of Cremona is the figure most associated with it. He came to Toledo, by his own account, looking for Ptolemy's Almagest, which was unavailable in Latin. He stayed, learned Arabic, and the list of translations attributed to him and his associates runs to more than seventy works, including the Almagest, Euclid's Elements, works of Galen and Ibn Sina's Canon of Medicine.

Under Alfonso X in the thirteenth century the work continued with a change of target language. Alfonso directed translation into Castilian rather than Latin, which is an early and deliberate act of building a vernacular scientific vocabulary.

What came through this channel is the foundation of the medieval European university curriculum. Aristotle arrived largely by this route, with the commentaries of Ibn Rushd attached, and the arrival caused a crisis serious enough to produce formal condemnations at Paris in 1210, 1270 and 1277.

Those condemnations are worth a moment. Aristotle, received through Arabic with Arabic commentary, was disruptive enough to be banned repeatedly at the leading university in Europe, and the bans failed. The material was too useful. Within a century Aristotle was the backbone of the syllabus.

The reception is where the transmission gets quietly edited. Ibn Rushd was read intensively and cited as the Commentator, and his own philosophical positions were argued against. Over the following centuries the commentaries stayed and the recognition thinned. By the time the story of the Renaissance recovery of the classics was written, the intermediary had become a stage rather than a participant.

There is also a translation loss that anyone reading medieval Latin Aristotle should know about. The text had passed through Syriac and Arabic before reaching Latin, sometimes with two intermediate languages and several centuries of commentary embedded in the choices. Later humanists translating directly from recovered Greek manuscripts found real discrepancies, and part of the Renaissance return to the Greek was a legitimate correction rather than a snub.

That is the honest complication. The direct route, when it opened, was better. But it opened onto a Europe that had spent three hundred years learning to read this material at all, and that education came through Toledo.

A city that changed hands and did not burn its libraries. On such things the whole subsequent shape of European thought turned.