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After the fall of the Roman Empire,
Western Europe entered the Middle Ages.
Now divided into domains, Europe sank into ignorance
and cut itself off from the knowledge
of the great achievements of the peoples of antiquity.
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The knowledge acquired by Greece, Mesopotamia, Egypt,
Persia, and India synthesized into what
today we call the Hellenistic culture.
It was preserved in Byzantium and formerly
in Alexandria, Pergamon, and Antiochia.
Before the final downfall, these centers of knowledge
managed to transmit their legacy to other places and cultures.
In the course of the centuries, through a succession
of accidents, their discoveries gradually
reached Europe, where they revolutionized medicine,
mathematics, the arts, and thought in general.
The Renaissance was approaching, preceded
by the phenomena of cultural recovery
in Sicily, Naples, Tarazona, and Toledo.
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The Arabs, in the course of their expansion,
which commenced in the 7th century,
made contact with different cultures, such as the Persian,
and especially with the Byzantine Empire,
where they connected with the Greek classical culture that
had been preserved there.
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They studied and translated the classics
and continued the research of the Hellenistic
culture, as well as creating new productions.
This cultural compilation of Islam
reached the Iberian Peninsula at the end of the
8th century by way of the Umayyads' dynasty.
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The Caliphate at Cordova was replaced by smaller kingdoms of Taifas.
In the year 1050, Toledo was one of the most important of them,
and it was ruled by the Caliph al-Mamun.
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[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
Amongst Toledo's personalities, there
was one called Yahya al-Ismail al-Mamun,
who was Taifa king for this area.
By taking the name of al-Mamun, he also
took the prestige of a cultivated king's name
per excellence in the Islamic world, Caliph al-Mamun from Baghdad.
Yahya's aims were to develop a cultural program of his own
to be able to demonstrate the importance of his kingdom's
role within the rather standardized Spanish Al-Andalus.
He was surrounded by scientists, Savan people, poets, jurists,
and developed a vast cultural program personally
in charge of bringing all he could from Cordova's library.
He also managed to bring to Toledo celebrities
such as Ezequiel to take measurements
and to carry out tasks within the city.
And that's what the Christians would find in Toledo,
not just another place with libraries at use.
They would find, however, the most advanced,
specialized library at that moment in time.
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
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When in 1885 Toledo capitulated before Alphonse VI,
the Christians were astonished by the
beauty and the culture of the Arab city.
Thus, for example, they were astounded by the books on medicine.
Medicine continues to be an almost religious science.
So when they suddenly found the first scientific studies,
such as those from Avicenna, whereby diagnosis
of illnesses were being made, solutions therefore
given, and procedures alike, they were amazingly surprised.
During the reign of Alphonse VI, Toledo
became the European capital of culture.
Attracted by the books treasured in this city,
scholars from all over the continent began to flock there.
They expected to take back to their courts, monasteries,
or universities of origin copies and
translations of the works in the Toledo library.
These scholars, together with the Jewish and Mozarab
translators who worked there, formed a group
whose work gave rise to the concept of the Toledo
School of Translators, so-called by Amable Jordan
in the 19th century, although at the time
it didn't exist as a physical institution.
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The true initiators of the translation work
were Pedro Alfonso, also called Moses Sephardi, and Abraham in Ezra.
This work came into vogue during the first half
of the 12th century, with the arrival of the man who
would become the Archbishop of Toledo, Raimundo de Sovietat.
During this period, Arab studies were developed,
and the bibliographic archives were
open to scholars, especially clerics.
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Ever since Visiogoth times, Arabs, Christians,
and an educated Jewish community had lived together in Toledo.
In the latter years, their number
had been enlarged by scholars arriving from Cordova and Seville.
Getting away from the religious strictness of
the Almohads, they found refuge in Toledo, where
they offered their knowledge of Arab and Romance languages
to the monks and the foreign servants.
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[SPEAKING SPANISH]
We know that the Jewish community arrived
during the Roman times, and thanks
to the Visiogoth's legislation of two councils,
we have reliable information regarding their style of life.
The problems that existed between Christian and Visigoth
communities, and mainly we know that it
was during the Arabic period that the Jewish community grew,
developed, and reached its highest peak.
Within Toledo's Jewish community,
there were to be two basic time stages, the Islamic and the Christian.
The first one around the 11th century,
and the second one during Alfonso de Cervantes reign.
In Toledo's so-called school of translators,
in which the Jews who lived in Toledo
developed such vast culture that not only influenced
its community, but had a lot to do with the
Spanish history and the European one too.
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
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At this time, in order to translate a work,
a Jew or a Mazareb read the text and put it into Romance.
Then a Latinist translated it into Latin.
In this manner, major works were transferred
from one language to another, from one culture to another.
For example, in philosophy, the text
of Aristotelian commentators, such as Avicenna and Averroes,
in medicine, the works of Hippocrates and Galen,
in mathematics, writings by Euclid and Al-Juwarizmi.
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Thanks to their work, the names of many
of those translators have come down to us.
Domingo Gondusalvo and Juan Hispano
translated books on astrology, astronomy, and
medicine, whilst also creating original works.
Hermann Aliman created translations
of the Ethics by Aristotle and of works
by Averroes, as well as the Psaltery.
Above all, Gerardo de Cremona, who, after learning Arabic,
translated 71 works, among them treatises
of Greek mathematics and astronomy, Greek and Arabic
medicine, and also of astrology and philosophy.
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In the 13th century, Alphonse X, the savant,
a cultured king in the style of the great Muslim caliphs,
became a patron of the arts and the sciences.
He even wrote his own works, A History of Spain,
several juridical treatises, such as the Partidas,
an astronomical treatise, and the Alphonsian Tables,
in turn based on the Arzakiel Tables, and the famous Cantacas as well.
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His reign was a period of intense scientific and literary activity.
He established schools of researchers and translators
in Murcia, Seville, and Toledo, which produced works such as
Calila El Dimna, the Book of the Muhammad Scale,
which some believe to be the inspiration for
the Divine Comedy, Picatrix, and many more.
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[SPEAKING SPANISH]
A work which has been considered as one of the first in Castilian
prose is Calila El Dimna, whose origin is a translation
and, nevertheless, was acclaimed immediately
to be a monument of the Castilian prose.
I ask myself, nowadays, which country would do that?
Even though we have universal literature
and within this category, we play some of
the best works, regardless of their language.
But what country would consider as their patrimony a work
originally written in a different language to theirs?
Calila El Dimna, as well as having
been translated from Arabic and having
been accepted as a Spanish work or a work of Castilian prose,
prior to this, around the 8th century,
this work had also been translated into Arabic
from tales, compilations, and so forth in
Sanskrit, ancient Persian, and the Pahlavi.
It was a great translator who considered
that such tales deserve to be translated.
It was well known by the readers of the time
that these tales were also a piece of classic Arabic literature.
The translation was considered a classic work
for the Castilian literature, as well.
Nowadays, I believe that our nationalist frontiers
withhold us from being open to contributions
made through these masterly translations that
would be in reach of all readers that cannot
read them in their original languages.
During Alphonse X's time, the procedure
for translating underwent a change.
Now, translations no longer ended up in
Latin, but usually in a Romance language.
This gave a great momentum to the
development of the Castilian language.
The old knowledge, the Oriental knowledge,
was transmitted to Europe first to Spain
through translations that were in Greek and in Latin to Arabic.
And we know that the Jews, together with the Arabs,
as they had Arabic language as a frank language,
the same as today the English language is
being used for business and culture all over the world,
translated directly from Arabic not to Latin, a language which
they identified as the language of their enemies,
but to Castilian language, the vernacular language.
The king chose very wisely the Castilian first,
and afterwards the Catalan as the cultural language.
All that happened in Toledo towards the 13th
and 14th centuries allowed Eastern knowledge
to reach Europe quicker, and therefore great advantages
were made, advantages that we use today,
such as the image, mathematics, computing, and astronomy.
After the death of the seventh king,
the intensity of the work of translation waned.
The most important works had already
been translated, copied, and distributed,
and there were other places where similar work was being performed.
In Naples and Palermo, Emperor Frederico II,
uncle of Alphonse X, organized centers
for the translation of Greek, Arabic,
and Hebrew manuscripts into Latin.
The influence of the so-called Toledo
School of Translators has been enormous.
Thanks to that work, universities
at Bologna, Montpellier, and the Sorbonne in Paris
could for the first time incorporate the originals of the classics.
Aristotelian writings served as the basis
for Thomas of Aquinas and for the scholastic philosophy.
Aristoteles was known very, very, very partially, very little.
He barely knew some comments, some very partial chapter of his work.
Aristoteles was partially known only.
Some comments and a few chapters of his work had reached them.
With his arrival came the most modern Greek thought.
Being stuck in occidental Europe at Plato and St. Augustine's
peak, introducing Aristoteles in the bubble in which we were
immersed at that time produced a radical change.
The repercussions of Aristoteles and commentators
such as Averroes, all the implications
that imply the modernism of Aristoteles' work
were brought forward by such avant-garde people
as Averroes that induced us to change somewhat
the basic stepstones of European civilization.
Above all, major universities favored
this change, which led to the Renaissance.
We cannot say that the Renaissance began here.
However, we should point out it would
have been very difficult for the Renaissance
to have been what it was without the work carried out
in Toledo regarding humanist concern and the human being itself.
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
Avicenna's Canon of Medicine was considered a fundamental text
in the European faculties until the 17th century.
Islamic trigonometry, the sexagesimal system,
the astronomical tables by Al-Juwarizmi,
and the works sponsored by Alphonse X
were the starting point of European astronomy
and the source of works by Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton.
Arabs brought over to Europe not only important works,
but also the experimental method and Arabic numerals,
different from the Roman numerical system.
The whole of these contributions constituted a giant step
towards the Renaissance and modern science.
Could we imagine our mathematical calculations without the number zero?
The phenomenon of the so-called School of Translators
of Toledo, as it wasn't in fact an actual school,
it's intrinsic to the city of Toledo itself
and its king, Alphonse X, so-called savant because of this.
This phenomenon is well-studied by Francisco Márquez Villanueva,
who takes us back in time with his
book, "The Alphonse Canon of Medicine.
" The book is about the history of Toledo and the history of the city.
He takes us back in time with his book, "The Alphonse Cultural Concept.
" For you to be able to understand this school's complex
phenomena, it was said at the time, God was being studied in Paris, law
was being studied in Bologna, and in Toledo, the devil.
The devil was nothing but natural science.
Nowadays, the Toledo School of Translators
aspires to break the mental and linguistic
barriers between the Arab world and the West.
We have always been made to believe that
we were a one and only Catholic nation.
Fortunately for us, and contradicting
these intrinsic ideas, we are a mixed
country, and we should be proud of that.
Our historical DNA is made up of many different people,
from the pre-Romans to the Romans, Iberians, Visigoths,
Arabs, or Moors, as they were so-called in our source
documents, Jews, and, of course, Christians.
What I mean to say is that the mosaic of people
who built Toledo's myth, the three cultures we lost
during the Inquisition's intolerance,
this is the myth we should recover,
an open and a multicultural society for this 21st century's new Spain.
This is not the first time that cultural
expansion has brought about human development.
Looking back over history from Toledo,
by way of Cordova and Baghdad, we arrive at the Byzantine Empire.
And from there, we reach the cultural nucleus
par excellence of antiquity, Alexandria.
From the Alexandria of today, with its blue sea,
and its beautiful streets and piazzas, and its new library,
we recall the history of this legendary city
that for several centuries was the indisputable center of knowledge.
Alexandria bears the name of Alexander the
Great, the first great Western emperor.
Alexander was the son of Philip of Macedonia,
and he inherited from his father the plan
to unite the Greek peoples and conquer Persia.
But he took this much further, extending his conquests
to India in the Orient and to Egypt in the South.
He was a disciple of Aristotle, and besides
being a military and political genius, he was a learned man.
He took Greek culture and organization to all the nations he conquered.
However, he retained their customs and
beliefs and fostered racial integration.
Alexander died young, leaving behind his
empire and the many cities he had founded.
From all of them, this one, Alexandria,
situated in the Western part of the mouth
of the Nile, was the most important.
After Alexander's death, his generals
shared out the empire among themselves.
Ptolemy, the first school friend of Alexander,
and perhaps his half-brother, appropriated
Egypt, starting a new dynasty of pharaohs
that lasted three centuries and ended
with the death of Cleopatra and the Roman invasion.
The Ptolemies period were Greek, fine, but they became Egyptian.
And they adopted the Egyptian culture.
That is the very important and significant part.
And they adopted the Egyptian religion, and they became gods.
Today, if you pass by the Library of Alexandria
at the entrance, you will find this statue of Ptolemy
II, during which the old great library of Alexandria was constructed.
So he represents that culture, Ptolemy,
which is the beginning of the dawn of Hellenism, which
is a combination of all those cultures
together, particularly in this period of time
in the East Mediterranean and the Mediterranean region.
So here is a great effect of the Egyptian culture on Hellenism.
Even the Greek generals and the Greek Macedonian group
that came to Egypt, they adopted the Egyptian culture and religion.
And that's why they were accepted by the Egyptian people.
And this is most significant to notice
why were these did not come as invaders,
but they were accepted because they came originally
en route to Persia as such, but they settled
in here, and they were accepted by them.
Following Alexander's inclusive philosophy,
Ptolemy tried to fuse Greek culture and
religion together with those of Egypt.
For example, from this synthesis emerged the cult
to a new god, Serapis, who was the embodiment of Osiris and Zeus.
The most important thing about this is that the Greeks
that lived here did not only worship their own god.
What I mean to say is that this treaty between Greek
and the Egyptian civilization is an experience
without precedence in any other area of the world.
The people that lived there, i.e.
those ones who lived in the oasis, the Egyptians would worship Amon,
whilst the Greeks would worship their
mythical hero, Theseus, together with Amon.
This laisson existed at the same time.
We can observe in the drawings of the temples
that the general view of the time was Egyptian.
These engravings are repeated within
their temples during Greco-Roman time.
These are Egyptian views, printed from the
pharaonic era, and repeated in the Greek-Roman era.
This is all clear in the temples.
It is clear in the temples that I mentioned.
Ptolemy selected Alexandria for the capital of his kingdom
and decided to make the city the most important in the world
for its beauty, economy, and culture.
Its basis was a grid map with two wide perpendicular streets
ornamented with statues and obelisks.
Built of masonry, stone, and marble,
it had underground conduits that carried
the water of the Nile to the houses.
In Alexandria, he built Alexander's tomb,
or soma, the basilia, or palace quarter,
which included a great museum in the Greek style with its library.
He joined the island of Pharaos to the continent
with an embankment a distance of one kilometer,
so creating the port that is still considered
Egypt's best and that made of Alexandria
the commercial capital of the Mediterranean.
On Pharos, he built a huge lighthouse over a
hundred meters high, considered in ancient times
to be one of the seven wonders of the world.
The museum, which imitates the Mesopotamian
and Egyptian temples and the Athenian academy,
gathered together the best scientists, poets,
and scholars from all over the known world.
Invited by the state, they could lead a life free of material worries
and dedicated to dialogue, reading, and research.
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Almost certainly, the inspirer of the museum was
Dimitrio de Falero, who was a ruler of Athens.
After a political setback, he had exiled
himself to Alexandria, attracted by Ptolemy I.
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The library of Alexandria received all the books
that could be collected throughout the years.
To find them, envoys were sent to various places
and those that could not be bought were copied.
It is even said that ships arriving
at the Alexandrian port were searched
and that all books found were seized in order to copy them.
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The majority of the works compiled
belonged to the Greek classical culture,
but they also copied books from the Egyptian
temples, history books from other peoples,
and text from the Iranian Zoroastrian doctrine,
as well as Buddhist books from India.
In order to translate the Bible,
72 Hebrew scholars were called to the city.
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It is difficult to know the number of books collected this way.
Estimates by specialists vary widely,
and they range between 50,000 and 700,000.
But it is known that all volumes were classified by subject matter
and that each one bore an inscription stating its origins and contents.
There were detailed catalogs, some of them
critical, evaluating the quality of the texts
and highlighting those of most interest.
Apart from being studied and translated,
texts were also polished until the most faithful
version of the original had been obtained.
Commentaries were added and copies given different uses.
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To this extraordinary compilation,
another task of the scholars, no less vast, must be added.
Century after century, they labored in Alexandria,
producing works that would have a great influence in the future.
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In mathematics, Euclid, who lived around the
year 300 BC, created the system of axioms.
The ordering of theorems
and the application of rigor in demonstrations.
The definition of Euclidean space
is still included in present-day mathematical texts.
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Archimedes studied in Alexandria.
He was a great creator of engines
that were useful in agriculture as well as in war.
He calculated the volumes and centers of gravity of various bodies.
He deduced the value of the number pi.
His works on hydrostatics are well-known because of his famous theorem.
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Heron was a creator of gears, automata,
and apparatus using steam power.
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Erat Thostanes, besides being the director
of the great library, was a great mathematician.
He was a great astronomer, geographer, mathematician, and philosopher.
He drew a world map with the distances
between the most important places
and was the first man to measure the perimeter of the Earth.
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In the second century, Claudius Ptolemy
crowned Alexandrian research in trigonometry with his Almagestor.
He created a model to explain the evolution
of planets and stars that, although
erroneous, was kept until Galileo's time.
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Galen created basic works on the art of healing
and on anatomy that prevailed until the Renaissance.
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There were many other important contributions
in the fields of linguistics, grammar, et cetera.
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In Alexandria, knowledge evolved to a very high level.
And it is impressive to see that the idea
of the heliocentric theory, the steam engine,
and the advances in so many areas were attained then,
and that it took more than a thousand years
for them to be overtaken and developed further.
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With the wane of the Ptolemaic dynasty,
Alexandria began its slow decline.
In the middle of the first century BC,
it was incorporated into the Roman Empire,
but its cultural activity continued,
although suffering different avatars.
Scholars, the museum, and the library
were immersed in various upheavals that had some
effect on them, but until the fourth century,
they continued studying, producing, and teaching,
now under the auspices of the Roman emperors.
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Finally, the city, and mainly its museum and library,
suffered from the impact of religious intolerance.
And to this day, it has not been possible
to determine the exact circumstances of its disappearance.
Was it the fire provoked by Caesar during the reign of Cleopatra?
Could it have been the successive
revolts which later affected the city?
Or was it the destruction of the city which later affected the city?
Or might it have been due to the rise of Constantinople?
Perhaps we will never know what was
destroyed and what could have been saved,
but the fact is that many Alexandrian
scholars continued their work somewhere else,
probably many copies, perhaps originals of their own works,
went to other libraries, so reaching the Byzantine Empire,
and from there, passing on to the Arab and Western
worlds, so generating a revolution in Europe
and favoring the development of universities and of modern culture.
The European Renaissance began with the
discovery in Toledo of the Alexandrian texts.
Toledo was the main nucleus through which Greek
and Arabic science was transmitted to the Latin West.
Between Alexandria and Baghdad,
the center of gravity of a cultural nucleus
was formed, arriving from the east at Samarkand
and culminating in the west in Toledo.
The process we have followed here shows us how our civilization arose
from the combined efforts of many human beings,
from different epochs and different peoples.
In those places, and thanks to their love of knowledge,
tolerance, and a broad-minded approach,
the exchange between cultures and peoples was made possible.
This encouraged a great spread of knowledge
across the world, and the people of the world
encouraged a great spread of knowledge
across both distance and time, which in turn created
new possibilities for the evolution of humankind.
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