Toledo School of Translators: Arabic learning in Latin

When Alfonso VI took Toledo in 1085, the new Christian rulers inherited its rich libraries of Arabic learning. Archbishop Raymond is traditionally credited with starting translations at the cathedral library, with a team of Mozarab Toledans, Jewish scholars and monks, although only one translation, by John of Seville, can be shown to have been dedicated to him. Often a native speaker rendered the Arabic text aloud in the vernacular and a scholar dictated its Latin equivalent to a scribe. Avendauth and Dominicus Gundissalinus, archdeacon of Cuéllar, worked together on Avicenna's encyclopedia, the Book of Healing (Kitab al-Shifa).

The most productive of the Toledo translators was Gerard of Cremona. He came to Toledo (by 1144 according to one account; the date is uncertain) in search of Ptolemy's Almagest, which could not be found in Latin, learned Arabic and stayed until his death in 1187. By one count he translated 87 books, by another 71: the Almagest (around 1175), Euclid's Elements, al-Khwarizmi's algebra, Archimedes on the measurement of the circle, Aristotle's On the Heavens, al-Farabi on the classification of the sciences and medical works of al-Razi. The historian Edward Grant called him the "greatest of all western translators".

In the 13th century Michael Scot translated Averroes's commentaries on Aristotle in Toledo, and under Alfonso X the translators worked into Castilian rather than Latin. The name "Toledo School of Translators" was coined only in the 19th century, and some scholars, such as Julio-César Santoyo, argue that there was no school at all — only a succession of individual translators and patrons.