TOLEDO: Cultural and Scientific Centre in the Middle Ages

In her professional working life, Pilar was a librarian at the National Library in Madrid, combined with teaching. She wrote a brief history of Toledo for visitors to the city a few months ago.  What made this walled city so important?  How did it include three religions in one small city?  Read on to learn about this UNESCO world heritage site. 

Pilar Martín, Madrid, Spain

Approximately 72 kilometres south of Madrid, the capital of Spain, perched atop a hill and encircled by the River Tagus, lies the city of Toledo. Previously the Romans knew it as Toletum and to the Muslims as Tulaytula. Its geostrategic location at the heart of the Iberian Peninsula—well connected by ancient Roman roads and situated alongside the river— likely contributed to its political prominence as the capital of the Visigothic Kingdom for nearly three centuries and, later, during the Middle Ages, as a major cultural and scientific centre. 

How did knowledge spread from Baghdad to Córdoba and from there to Toledo?

The Muslim invasion in 711 led to the conquest of almost the whole Iberian Peninsula, which came to be known as Al-Andalus, with its capital in Córdoba. It initially began to operate as an emirate dependent under the authority of Damascus, and in the 10th century, Abd al-Raḥman III proclaimed himself caliph, independent of Baghdad.

The connection with the eastern caliphate - first political and subsequently cultural—was manifest. In the second half of the 8th century, during the reign of the caliph al-Manṣūr in Baghdad, a great patron of learning, an Indian delegation delivered to the caliph a manuscript in which he had shown considerable interest. This work, known among the Arabs as the “Great Sindhind”, was nothing else than the “Brahma sphuṭa siddhanta, composed in the form of a rhymed Sanskrit poem by its author and compiler, Brahmagupta. It was a mathematical treatise reflecting on the properties of zero, among other scientific and astronomical matters. The caliph ordered it to be translated into Arabic at the House of Wisdom, the great library and intellectual centre of Baghdad, thereby initiating the translation movement of Greek, Persian and Indian works into Arabic. 

These translations were subsequently transmitted to Córdoba, then to Toledo, and from there to the rest of Europe. The Arabic version of Brahmagupta’s text, produced by the Persian mathematician Al-Khwarizmi, would in turn be translated in Toledo into Hebrew and Latin.

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