The story of today’s subject starts in the Iberian Peninsula at the beginning of the 8th century, also known as the Muslim conquest of Hispania, an event whose influence would be felt for at least 800 years. During this period of conflict across the land, the scales tipped towards one side or the other throughout endless battles that assaulted the cities around the land and would notably mark their cultural development. One of the most famous cases was the city of Toledo, which was taken back for the Kingdom of León by Alfonso VI and snatched from the Muslim forces of Al-Qadir in 1085, the emir of the taifa of Toledo. As the story goes, once it was conquered by the Christians, the city was ruled in a state of peace and harmony among the three monotheistic religions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam). This cultural mixture caused knowledge to be shared from highly diverse sources, effectively making Toledo one of the intellectual pillars of Europe. This version of the story favours the “romantic” myth of Spain having three cultures, but the truth is that this period was very conflictive and, in fact, the Toledo School of Translators was very influential in that process of sharing intercultural knowledge.
First of all, we should clarify that this was not a school for teaching as we know it today, the name actually refers to a process started by the kings, abbots and bishops who wanted to promote the translation of works in Arabic, Hebrew and Persian to Latin. Why would they want to do this you ask?
It turns out that the historical context presented a Christian Spain living in a period with a certain vitality, but that actually contained a rudimental society and a very limited culture after the isolation experienced by the Visigoths during the years of the conquest. On the other hand, Muslim Spain was submerged in political and social chaos that made it incapable of recovering the lost territory, although their civilisation had benefited thanks to the fact that Islam had been adopted in several countries, which made it possible to include knowledge from Greece, Persia and Babylon.
Much of this came to the Islamic Empire during the final years of the Roman Empire, when many works were translated to Syrian and, centuries later, to Arabic. The copies of these texts would end up arriving at the libraries throughout the Caliphate of Cordoba and, from there, they easily reached Christian territory.
An obvious effect is that Christian Spain wanted to strengthen its position of leadership by accessing the knowledge collected by Muslim Spain and so they started a process to translate these texts.
One of the first people to promote this process was the Archbishop Raimundo de Sauvetat, who thought up interesting chains of translations: first, he asked the Mozarabs (Christians under Muslim occupation), who had been in contact with the Arabic language, to translate the texts to what we now know as ancient Spanish, and then he asked the clerics of the Cathedral of Toledo to translate these versions in romance languages to Latin, which was the language used to spread knowledge in this period. Likewise, the Jews translated from Arabic to Hebrew and then versions of their texts were made in Latin.
The Toledo School of Translators was responsible for translating Aristotle, Plato, Ptolemy, Euclid, Avicenna’s texts on metaphysics, Arabic astronomy, Fons Vitae by Avicebron, etc. In summary, 47 % of the texts translated were about calculus and cosmology, 21 % about philosophy, 20 % about medicine, 8 % about religion, physics and natural sciences and 4 % about alchemy and occult sciences.
This work was continued by Alfonso X the Wise, who was responsible for supervising the translations and revising some of the texts. At the end of the 8th century, they translated not only to Latin, but they published versions in Spanish and in French, which let this knowledge quickly move across Europe, causing a surge in science in later centuries. For this reason, it could be said that Toledo was an intellectual pillar of Pre-Renaissance knowledge since it was a gateway for knowledge to enter all of Europe, a project that would not have been possible without the help of translators, among other players.
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