The Translators of Toledo

Toledo, a city on a rocky bend of the Tagus in the heart of the Iberian peninsula, had been a centre of Muslim al-Andalus, rich in Arabic libraries, before it passed to Christian rule in 1085; and it became, over the twelfth century, the most important of the gateways through which the scientific and philosophical heritage of the Arabic-Islamic world was translated into Latin and carried into the rest of Europe. In the libraries and studies of the city, scholars of the three faiths, Jewish, Christian and Muslim, worked together at the labour of translation: a man who knew Arabic would read a book and render it into the common Romance speech, and another would set it down in Latin, so that the great works of Arabic science and philosophy, the astronomy, mathematics, medicine, optics and the rest, together with the books of the Greek philosophers that the Muslims had preserved, enlarged and commented upon, were made available to the Latin world. Through Toledo and a few other channels, the works of al-Khwarizmi and the algebra, of Ibn Sina in medicine, of Ibn Rushd on Aristotle, and of many others, entered the schools and the new universities of Europe and helped to set in motion its own intellectual awakening. This scene depicts the work of translation at Toledo: scholars of different dress and faith over their manuscripts, an Arabic book being read and rendered, astronomical tables and an astrolabe and the treatises of the sciences on the desks. In keeping with the project's ethics any figures are anonymous and at a distance.