Latin translations of the 12th century

• 1. Introduction

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  Latin translations of the 12th century transformed the intellectual life of medieval Europe by funneling centuries of Arabic scholarship into a language that European scholars could read. Gerard of Cremona, born around 1114, traveled all the way from Italy to Toledo because he could not find Ptolemy's Almagest anywhere in the Latin world. Once he arrived and discovered "an abundance of books in Arabic on every subject," he decided to learn Arabic from scratch just to translate them. His story is not unusual. It was the pattern of an era.

  By the time Toledo fell to Christian forces in 1085, and Sicily followed in 1091, European scholars suddenly had access to cities where Arabic speakers still formed large communities. Greek philosophy had been largely absent from western Europe for centuries. A handful of monasteries preserved some texts; fewer still made copies. The question the rest of this documentary explores is how a generation of translators, working in cathedral libraries, royal courts, and border cities, rebuilt Europe's intellectual foundations from borrowed knowledge.

• 2. Centuries of Absence

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  St. Jerome was hostile to Aristotle, and St. Augustine had little interest in philosophy beyond applying logic to theology. Those attitudes shaped western Europe for a very long time. Ancient Greek ideas were nearly absent from the region for centuries, preserved only in a handful of monasteries that copied works at a slow and uneven rate.

  There was one partial exception. The Anglo-Saxon monk Alcuin helped reintroduce some Greek ideas during the Carolingian Renaissance, but after Charlemagne's death intellectual life fell back into decline. Gerbert of Aurillac, who later became Pope Sylvester II, was one of the few who kept philosophical thought moving. He traveled to the region of the Spanish March around Barcelona as early as the end of the 10th century to study mathematics. Yet for roughly two centuries after his time, philosophical thought developed little across Europe.

  Scholastic thought began to stir again by the 12th century, feeding the rise of universities. Those universities gathered what little Greek thought had survived. They used Boethius' commentaries on Aristotle. They also became forums for ideas arriving through new translations from Arabic, which gave scholars a first glimpse of how much they had been missing.

• 3. The Frontier Cities

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  Toledo fell from Arab hands in 1085, Sicily in 1091, and Jerusalem in 1099. The small population of the Crusader Kingdoms contributed almost nothing to the translation effort. Sicily and Spain were different stories, shaped by their languages and their histories.

  Sicily had been part of the Byzantine Empire until 878, then under Muslim control until 1060, then under Norman rule. The Norman Kingdom of Sicily ran a trilingual bureaucracy. It also maintained ties with the Greek East, which meant manuscripts and scholars could travel in both directions. Sicilians generally translated directly from Greek into Latin. When Greek texts were unavailable, they worked from Arabic. Henry Aristippus brought a copy of Ptolemy's Almagest back to Sicily as a gift from the Byzantine Emperor to King William I, and he himself translated Plato's Meno and Phaedo into Latin.

  Spain offered something different: a rich mixture of Latin and Arab cultures living side by side. Toledo, with its large population of Arabic-speaking Christians known as Mozarabs, had been an important center of learning since at least the end of the 10th century. Because Spanish collections held many scholarly works in Arabic, translators there worked almost exclusively from Arabic rather than Greek. That difference in source language shaped the character of what each region produced.

• 4. What They Sought

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  Unlike the Renaissance scholars who would later crave classical literature and history, the 12th-century translators wanted science, philosophy, and, to a lesser extent, religion. Their concerns were practical and urgent. They wanted mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and logic.

  The religious dimension was not absent. Peter the Venerable, the abbot of Cluny, sponsored the first Latin translation of the Qur'an in 1142. He called upon Robert of Ketton, Herman of Carinthia, Peter of Poitiers, and a Muslim known only as "Mohammed" to produce the work, titled Lex Mahumet pseudoprophete. The Toledo translators also made available texts from Arabic and Hebrew philosophers that the Archbishop deemed important for understanding Aristotle. Mark of Toledo translated the Qur'an a second time at the close of the 12th century and into the 13th.

  Medicine was the other great preoccupation. Constantine the African, a Christian from Carthage who studied medicine in Egypt and became a monk at Monte Cassino, translated medical works from Arabic just before the main burst of 12th-century activity. His translations included Ali ibn Abbas al-Majusi's medical encyclopedia known in Latin as Liber Pantegni, as well as works by Hippocrates and Galen as those texts had been adapted by Arabic physicians. Medicine and logic were often the first subjects new universities wanted access to, and the translations answered that demand directly.

• 5. The Toledo School

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  Raymond of Toledo launched the first organized translation efforts at the library of the Cathedral of Toledo. His team included Mozarabic Toledans, Jewish scholars, teachers from the Madrasa, and monks from the Order of Cluny. They translated from Arabic into Castilian and then from Castilian into Latin, or sometimes directly from Arabic into Latin. The cathedral became known as the Escuela de Traductores de Toledo, described as operating on a scale and importance not matched in the history of western culture.

  Historians caution against overstating the school's formal structure. Only one translation, by John of Seville, can be definitively linked to Archbishop Raymond by name. Toledo was more accurately a geographically bilingual environment where local conditions made translation work practical and appealing. Translators arrived from across Europe and the region became the dominant center not because a formal academy existed but because the books, the speakers, and the scholars were all concentrated there.

  Gerard of Cremona translated 87 books during his time in Toledo. That list included Ptolemy's Almagest, Euclid's Elements of Geometry, major works of Aristotle including the Physics and On the Heavens, al-Khwarizmi's work on algebra, and medical texts by Avicenna and Rhazes. Toledo's importance grew further under King Alfonso X of Castile, who insisted that translated output be "llanos de entender" ("easy to understand"). Scholars arrived from Italy, Germany, England, and the Netherlands. Some were paid high salaries by the King himself, recruited from Seville, Cordoba, Gascony, and Paris.

• 6. William of Moerbeke

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  William of Moerbeke, born around 1215 and known in the Latin world as a prolific translator, undertook at the assumed request of Thomas Aquinas a complete new translation of Aristotle's works from Greek into Latin. The motivation was specific: the many Latin copies of Aristotle then in circulation had originated in Spain through Arabic-to-Latin translations, and those translations were suspected of carrying the philosophical and theological errors of Averroes, whose rationalist commentaries had influenced the Spanish tradition.

  William was the first translator to render Aristotle's Politics from Greek into Latin, completing that work around 1260. His translations were already considered standard classics by the 14th century. The 14th-century scholar Henricus Hervodius praised them for being literal, faithful to the spirit of Aristotle, and free of rhetorical elegance. That blunt fidelity was the point.

  For several of William's translations, the original Greek texts have since vanished entirely. Without his work, those texts would be lost to history. He also translated mathematical treatises by Hero of Alexandria and Archimedes. His translation of the Elements of Theology of Proclus, completed in 1268, proved especially significant because the Elements of Theology is one of the foundational sources for the Neo-Platonic philosophical currents that shaped 13th-century thought. William's own copy of his Archimedes translation, made in 1269 at the papal court in Viterbo, with commentaries by Eutocius, is held in the Vatican collection.

• 7. Beyond the Cathedral

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  Translating activity spread well beyond Toledo and the main cathedral centers. Robert of Ketton worked in Navarre, Herman of Carinthia in Northern Spain and across the Pyrenees into Languedoc, Hugh of Santalla in Aragon, Robert of Chester in Segovia, and Plato of Tivoli in Catalonia. Plato of Tivoli's translations included al-Battani's astronomical and trigonometrical work De Motu Stellarum and Archimedes' Measurement of a Circle. Robert of Chester translated al-Khwarizmi's Algebra into Latin and also, in 1144, produced what appears to be the first Latin translation of an alchemical work, the Liber de compositione alchemiae.

  In southern France and Italy, Arabic scientific texts were also being translated into Hebrew, not Latin. Large Jewish communities there had little knowledge of Arabic, so Hebrew translations served as an intermediate step. Translators such as Profatius Judaeus used those Hebrew versions as a bridge on the way to Latin. This practice grew most widespread from the 13th through the 16th centuries.

  Fibonacci's Liber Abaci, published in 1202, presented the first complete European account of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system, drawn from Arabic sources. That single transmission ultimately reshaped how all of Europe counted, calculated, and recorded commercial transactions. James of Venice, who probably spent time in Constantinople, translated Aristotle's Posterior Analytics from Greek into Latin in the mid-12th century, making the complete Aristotelian logical corpus available in Latin for the first time.