Raymond of Toledo

Raymond of Toledo was the archbishop under whom Arabic learning began passing into Latin in quantity, and the school of translators associated with his name changed what European scholars could read. He was a French Benedictine from Gascony, brought into Spain as part of the Cluniac influx that followed the reconquest, made bishop of Osma and then archbishop of Toledo in 1125, some forty years after Alfonso VI took the city. What Toledo held was a working population of Arabic-speaking Christians, Jews and Muslims and, more importantly, libraries: the accumulated scientific and philosophical literature of the Islamic world, including Greek texts that had reached Baghdad and never reached the Latin west at all. Under his patronage translators worked in pairs, a local speaker rendering the Arabic into Castilian aloud and a Latinist writing it down, which is how Dominicus Gundissalinus and the convert Avendauth produced Latin versions of Avicenna. Gerard of Cremona, who came to Toledo looking for Ptolemy's Almagest and stayed for the rest of his life, translated some seventy works there. Aristotle's natural philosophy, Euclid, Galen, al-Khwarizmi's algebra and al-Farabi entered the European curriculum by this route. The scale of the enterprise has been exaggerated into a formal academy that probably never existed, and Raymond's personal role is documented thinly - he is named in prefaces as the patron and little more. He also secured the primacy of Toledo over the Spanish church and campaigned with Alfonso VII. He died in 1152. The Castilian intermediate stage of the translations left its own mark, and some of the works survive in that form as well as in Latin. The mistaken idea of a chartered College of Translators at Toledo dates from a nineteenth-century historian and has proved very hard to dislodge. The work continued under his successors and reached its height a generation after his death.

• Nationality: Spanish
• Roles: religious