Gerard of Cremona
Gerard of Cremona was the Lombard who went to Toledo about 1144 to find a copy of Ptolemy's Almagest, which did not exist in Latin, learned Arabic there, and stayed forty years translating; the list his pupils drew up after his death has seventy-one works, and it is the largest single transfer of knowledge from one language to another that any one man has made. He was born in Cremona about 1114 and had exhausted, his pupils say, what the Latin schools could teach him. Toledo had been Christian for sixty years when he came and was still an Arabic city, with the libraries of the taifa kings intact and a population of Mozarabs and Jews who read both languages. The method was collaborative and the pupils record one collaborator by name, a Mozarab called Galib, who helped with the Almagest; the Arabic was read aloud and turned into Castilian, and Gerard turned the Castilian into Latin. The Almagest was finished in 1175. The rest of the list is the syllabus of the medieval university. From Aristotle the Physics, On the Heavens, On Generation and Corruption, the Meteorology and the Posterior Analytics; Euclid's Elements in the Arabic version; Archimedes on the circle; al-Khwarizmi's Algebra, which gave the subject its name; al-Kindi and al-Farabi; the Canon of Medicine of Avicenna, a million words that was the medical textbook of Europe until the seventeenth century; Galen, Hippocrates and Rhazes; the astronomy of al-Farghani and the Toledan tables; and the Book of Causes, which Aquinas would take for Aristotle and then discover was Proclus. His Latin was literal to the point of keeping the Arabic word order, which is why so many technical terms in the sciences came into Latin as transliterations, and he preferred not to put his name on the work. He died at Toledo in 1187, and the pupils who wrote the list did so because, they said, he had been too modest to leave one. A second Gerard, of Sabbioneta, a century later, has been confused with him since. The archbishop's cathedral chapter, where he held a canonry, buried him.
- Lived: 1114 CE – 1187 CE
- Nationality: Italian
- Roles: translator, scholar
