This adaptation is published with the authorization of Professor Xu Shanwei. It is an AI-assisted contemporary editorial adaptation by Clio Walker, based on Xu’s book and sources actually consulted, using a first-person guide’s voice. It is neither a new personal travelogue by the professor nor a chapter-by-chapter reproduction. Authorization does not imply his individual approval of every additional interpretation.

Late in the eleventh century, someone in al-Andalus wrote down a warning: apart from books of religious law, scientific books should not be sold to Jews or Christians. They would buy them, translate them, and put the names of their own people and their own bishops on them.

A ban like that is only written when the trade already exists.

A few decades later, in Toledo, newly back in Christian hands, Arabic books on astronomy, medicine and mathematics turned into Latin one after another. Later history books liked to say that a “Toledo School of Translators” stood there.

In the last story we watched Constantine turn other men’s books into his own. In this one I want to sit down at the translators’ table in Toledo. Who actually sat around it? And once a book was translated, whose name stayed with it, and whose did not?

For the Sake of One Book

Start with the most famous man at the table: Gerard of Cremona.

For his life we have, in effect, one reliable document. After his death his companions wrote a short eulogy and attached it to what was probably his last translation, the Latin version of Galen’s Art of Medicine. After it they listed the books he had translated: seventy-one of them.

The eulogy opens by explaining why it was written. Master Gerard must not lie hidden in the darkness of silence; he must not lose the fame he earned; and no one must brazenly fix another name on the books he translated, especially since he put his own name on none of them.

Then it tells where he came from. He had grown up in philosophy from the cradle and learned every part of it the Latins could teach. But there was one book he could not find anywhere among the Latins: Ptolemy’s great astronomical work, the Almagest. For the sake of that book, he went to Toledo.

There he saw Arabic books in every field in numbers past counting. Thinking how poor the Latins were in these subjects, he learned Arabic in order to translate. He stayed in Toledo and translated until the end of his life.

Xu Shanwei notes that in 1175 Gerard translated the Arabic Almagest into Latin at Toledo, and that this version circulated very widely. The eulogy says he died in 1187 in his seventy-third year, so he was born around 1114. That puts his years of translating in Toledo at close to four decades.

The Table an Englishman Saw

Story 4 of this column introduced Daniel of Morley, the Englishman who was disappointed by his studies in Paris and went to Toledo instead. Back in England, he wrote a Philosophia for the bishop of Norwich, and in it he mentions Toledo twice.

Once, he says Gerard rendered the Almagest into Latin while a Mozarab named Galippus interpreted. Mozarabs were Arabic-speaking Christians who had lived under Muslim rule.

The other time, he says he himself learned about the universe from this Galippus “in the language of Toledo” and wrote it down in Latin. Scholars generally take “the language of Toledo” to be the local spoken Romance; whether Castilian or the Mozarabs’ own dialect is disputed.

Daniel also says he argued with Gerard in Toledo over whether astrology could be trusted. Gerard was then teaching astrology to a group of listeners, reading from a book scholars have identified as Abū Maʿshar’s Shorter Introduction.

These few lines are the most direct eyewitness view we have of the Toledo table. An Arabic book lies open; someone reads it out in the local speech; someone writes it down in Latin; and around them others listen, ask and argue.

Four Hands

Another document describes this method even more plainly.

In the later twelfth century, Avicenna’s On the Soul was translated into Latin. Its preface, addressed to the archbishop of Toledo, explains how the book came out of Arabic: “I” spoke each word aloud in the vernacular, and the archdeacon Dominicus turned each word into Latin.

The “I” of the preface calls himself “Avendauth the Israelite,” a Jewish scholar. The archdeacon Dominicus is the man later often called Gundisalvi. The cathedral cartularies of Toledo record an archdeacon “Dominicus Colarensis” from 1162 to 1178, and scholars generally identify him with this translator.

One person reads the Arabic out in the spoken language; another writes the spoken words down in Latin. The French scholar Marie-Thérèse d’Alverny gave this a name: translation “with four hands.”

Avendauth and the Jewish scholars behind him belong to the next story. Here I leave only a question: when two people translate a book together, whose name does the book keep?

The Unnamed at the Table

The answer is not flattering.

Galippus appears only in one Englishman’s book. His name is in no translation produced in Toledo. Gerard’s Almagest does not mention him, and neither does the eulogy.

Avendauth’s preface is perfectly clear, yet for centuries those who wrote about Toledo remembered the archdeacon Gundisalvi, and Avendauth became a blurred shadow.

Earlier still, in 1142, Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, had men translate the Qur’an in Spain, an episode Xu also records. The team included a local Muslim helper named “Mahumeth,” but Peter mentioned him only some years later.

The translation historian Anthony Pym, putting these cases side by side, sees a general rule: the person who read the original aloud always ranked below the person who wrote the Latin. The first understood the book; the second commanded Latin, and in the Latin world Latin was the language in which names survived.

Yet Gerard himself did not sign his translations either. Of thirty-four manuscripts of his Almagest that scholars have examined, only four give the translator’s name. His companions wrote the eulogy and drew up the list precisely so that his name would not vanish the way Galippus’s did.

In the last story, Constantine removed his authors’ names. At this table in Toledo, the names removed were the translators’ own, and those of the people sitting beside them.

Really Four Hands?

Even so, scholars have not settled what actually happened at the table.

Paul Kunitzsch, the German scholar who studied how the Almagest was transmitted, found traces of a Mozarab go-between in the Latin text; others analyzing Gerard’s translations have found similar marks of oral interpretation.

The French historian of medicine Danielle Jacquart, however, argues that a close look at Gerard’s translations, especially the Almagest, rules out the “four hands” method. In her view Gerard almost certainly translated directly from Arabic; Mozarab scholars may have helped him in many ways, but that does not mean they interpreted the text for him first.

As for the preface to On the Soul, some scholars point out that its translation shows no trace of oral mediation, and that its style differs from other translations attributed to Dominicus. The division of labor the preface describes may not be how the work was actually done.

What is certain is how Gerard treated his books. Kunitzsch found three successive versions of the Latin Almagest, each revision made against newly obtained Arabic manuscripts. One version states that it was copied from a text made in Toledo in 1175 by a Master Thaddeus of Hungary.

Gerard also often wrote in the margins the meanings of transliterated words, readings from other manuscripts, and further explanations. The source’s words were carried over one by one, and his own explanations went alongside.

Literal translation could still produce comedy. Gerard and a later translator both rendered a cause of skin infection as “the night plant.” Later readers found it was a miscopying of the Arabic word for “daughters”: the original meant “daughters of the night.” Only in the sixteenth century, when physicians were hunting for clues to the new disease of syphilis, did a new version spell it out. The cause lay in people, not plants.

Where Was the School?

Xu Shanwei writes that in 1130 Archbishop Raymond founded a regular school of translation in Toledo that drew scholars from all over Europe. Pym observes that almost every history of translation mentions this “School of Toledo.”

Research over recent decades has grown increasingly doubtful about the school.

Pym shows that the “School of Toledo” was largely the discovery of two nineteenth-century historians. In 1819 the French scholar Amable Jourdain put together two translators’ prefaces that seemed to be addressed to Archbishop Raymond and announced that he had found a “college” of translators founded by the archbishop, a discovery that made up, he said, for all the thorns along his path. But d’Alverny later showed that Jourdain’s conclusion rested on a misplaced comma: the preface to On the Soul was more likely addressed to Archbishop John, who succeeded Raymond in 1152.

In 1874 the German scholar Valentin Rose read Daniel’s Philosophia and concluded that Toledo had a formal “school” where Gerard lectured to young men from many countries.

Raymond did sponsor translation. John of Seville translated a treatise on the difference between spirit and soul and dedicated it to him. But no twelfth-century document mentions a school of translators. Daniel does not; neither do Gerard’s eulogy and book list.

Gerard’s signature does appear in the Toledo cathedral cartularies. In 1157 he is listed among the canons as “Master Gerard”; in 1174 and 1176 he signs as “Gerard, called master.” Whether that “called” was modesty or a sign that his status had changed, scholars can only guess.

So the safer statement is this. Toledo had several archbishops who paid for translation, canons in the cathedral, scholars who had come from Italy and England, Arabic-speaking Mozarabs and Jews, and a group of companions around Gerard. They worked at one desk after another. It looked like a school, but it never had a school’s name.

Epilogue

In 1187 Gerard died in Toledo.

In the early fourteenth century, a Dominican friar wrote in his chronicle that Gerard was buried in his home town of Cremona, in the monastery of Santa Lucia, and that he left his library there. That account comes more than a century later and may not be entirely right. But on March 23, 1191, someone made an astronomical observation at Cremona, and the record was copied into manuscripts of Gerard’s translations; some of the earliest and finest copies of his work also come from northern Italy. His books probably did go home.

He left no name on his books; his companions remembered it for him. Galippus had no such companions, only an Englishman who happened to write him down.

Many people sat at the translators’ table in Toledo. Today we can name only a few of them.

Next, we look for the Jewish scholars who sat on the other side of the table.

Sources and editorial boundaries

1. Authorized base text: Xu Shanwei, Eastern Learning’s Westward Transmission and the Revival of Western Culture. Used: chapter 1 on Spain (Archbishop Raymond founding a regular school of translation at Toledo in 1130 that “attracted scholars from all regions of Europe”); chapter 1 on missions (Peter the Venerable organizing a Latin Qur’an in 1142); the opening of chapter 2, section 2 (Toledo as the twelfth-century center of Arabic-to-Latin translation); the passage on Jewish scholars (Gerard translating with the help of a Jew and a local Christian); the passage on translation centers; and the astronomy passage (Gerard’s 1175 Almagest from Arabic at Toledo, widely circulated). Read in full. Gerard’s life, the number of his translations, and Daniel’s Paris experience already appear in story 4 and are not repeated. 2. Danielle Jacquart, “Des traductions au fil de la plume et à la chaîne ? Le cas de Gérard de Crémone,” Cahiers d’études hispaniques médiévales 41 (2018): 111–123, Cairn online, read. https://doi.org/10.3917/cehm.041.0111 Used for: Gerard born c. 1115, reportedly died at Toledo in 1187 in his 73rd year, some forty years translating; the companions’ (socii) eulogy and list of 71 translations as the only reliable source, placed after his possibly last translation, Galen’s Ars medica with ʿAlī ibn Riḍwān’s commentary; the list made because Gerard never signed his work; Daniel’s report of Gerard teaching astrology from Abū Maʿshar’s Shorter Introduction, their dispute, and the conversation with the Mozarab Galippus; Jacquart’s view that the translations, especially the Almagest, exclude the “four hands” method (d’Alverny’s phrase) and were made directly from Arabic; Kunitzsch’s three successive states of the Almagest using new Arabic manuscripts; only 4 of 34 Almagest manuscripts naming the translator; the intermediate state copied from a 1175 Toledo exemplar by magister Thadeus Ungarus; the Toledo cartularies (May 1157 “magister Girardus”; March 1174 and 1 March 1176 “Girardus dictus magister,” after Hernández 1985 nos. 119, 165, 174); Francesco Pipino’s chronicle on burial and library at Santa Lucia in Cremona; the 23 March 1191 Cremona observation; the Italian origin of some of the earliest and finest copies. Eulogy (Burnett 2001 edition, quoted in Jacquart n. 3): “Ne igitur magister Gerardus Cremonensis sub taciturnitatis tenebris lateat, ne fame gratiam quam meruit, amittat, ne per presumptuosam rapinam libris ab ipso translatis titulus infigatur alienus, presertim cum nulli eorum nomen suum inscripsit […]. Et cum ab infantie cunabulis in gremiis philosophie educatus esset et ad cuiuslibet partis ipsius notitiam secundum Latinorum studium pervenisset, amore tamen Almagesti, quem apud Latinos minime reperta, Toletum per exit.” Continuation (same edition, quoted by Martínez Gázquez 2019): “Ubi librorum cuiusque facultatis habundantiam in Arabico cernens et Latinorum penurie de ipsis quam nouerat miserans, amore transferendi linguam edidicit Arabicam.” Pipino (Muratori, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores 9, 1725, col. 601, quoted in Jacquart n. 13): “Sepultus est Cremone in Monasterio Sanctae Luciae, ubi suorum librorum bibliothecam reliquit.” 3. Anthony Pym, “Twelfth-Century Toledo and Strategies of the Literalist Trojan Horse,” Target 6/1 (1994): 43–66, author’s PDF, read in full. https://usuaris.tinet.cat/apym/on-line/translation/1994_toledo.pdf Used for: the “School of Toledo” as largely the creation of Jourdain (1819) and Rose (1874); Jourdain’s “college” and his remark about the thorns on his path; d’Alverny’s (1964) misplaced comma, the likely addressee Archbishop John (from 1152), and the translator “Avendauth Israelita”; John of Spain’s (Johannes Hispanensis’s) Costa ben Luca preface addressed to Raymond; Daniel’s two mentions of Galippus (Sudhoff 1917 edition); the 1175 Almagest; Kunitzsch and others on oral mediation; the socii’s list mentioning no collaboration, school or church; “Dominicus Colarensis archidiaconus,” 1162–1178, identified with the De anima archdeacon (d’Alverny 1989); Galippus absent from all Spanish texts; van Riet on the De anima translation; the 1142 Qur’an project and the helper “Mahumeth”; the subordination of oral intermediaries; Gerard’s transliterations, variants and glosses; “planta noctis” (after Sudhoff 1909); the late-eleventh-century Andalusian warning against selling scientific books (quoted from d’Alverny 1982); speculation on “dictus magister.” Daniel: “quod a Galippo mixtarabe in lingua Tholetana didici latine subscribitur”; “Girardus Tholetanus, qui Galippo mixtarabe interpretante Almagesti latinavit.” De anima preface: “Hunc igitur librum vobis praecipientibus, et me singula verba vulgariter proferente, et Dominico Archidiacono singula in latinum convertente, ex arabico translatum” (van Riet 1972 edition, quoted by Pym). The body retells all of these in plain English. 4. José Martínez Gázquez, “The importance of Ptolemy and the Almagest in the work of the translators of Arabic Science in the Middle Ages,” Imago Temporis. Medium Aevum 13 (2019), read for the eulogy passage. https://doi.org/10.21001/itma.2019.13.05 Used for: the eulogy written soon after Gerard’s death and attached to the Tegni; the passage from “amore Almagesti” to “linguam edidicit Arabicam”; the list of 71 entries as incomplete; Daniel confirming Galippus’s help with the Almagest. 5. Secondary: English translation and notes of Valentin Rose’s 1874 article (arXiv:1712.05437), read, used only for Rose’s reading of Gerard’s “lectures” and the name “Girardus Tholetanus.” https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.05437 Wikidata Q367240 (Gerard, 1114–1187, born Cremona, died Toledo), Q6231 (Cremona coordinates), Q5836 (Toledo coordinates). https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q367240 6. Boundaries: no dialogue or inner thoughts are invented for Gerard, Galippus, Daniel, Avendauth or Dominicus. The image of the open book at the table is an editorial summary of Daniel’s words “interpreting,” “writing down in Latin” and “listeners,” not an eyewitness quotation. Gerard’s birth year is reckoned from “his seventy-third year” and is approximate. The “four hands” section sets Pym (after Kunitzsch and others) beside Jacquart without deciding between them. The Andalusian warning is cited through Pym; the original was not seen, and no author is named. Pipino wrote over a century after Gerard, and the text says so. “The night plant” follows Pym’s report of Sudhoff (the term occurs in Gerard and in the sixteenth-century translator Alpago); no specific book is named, and “the cause lay in people, not plants” is an editorial summary. 7. Base text check: the base text says Archbishop Raymond founded a “regular school of translation” at Toledo in 1130. Pym and others find no such school in twelfth-century documents and regard the “School of Toledo” as largely a nineteenth-century construction; the story keeps the base text’s statement and reports the scholarly doubts. The base text places Peter the Venerable’s Qur’an project at Toledo in 1142; Pym places it in northern Spain and has Peter meeting Raymond at Salamanca. The story says only “in Spain.” 8. Map: May 1157, “Master Gerard” among the canons in the Toledo cartularies; 1175, the Latin Almagest (after Thaddeus’s 1175 Toledo copy); 1187, Gerard’s death at Toledo. All three points use present-day Toledo (Wikidata Q5836). The 1191 Cremona observation is not directly Gerard’s, and the Cremona burial rests on a late chronicle; neither is mapped.