The Translation Movement into Latin

The Mirror Image

Between roughly 1100 and 1300, Latin Europe did to Arabic science exactly what Abbasid Baghdad had done to Greek science three centuries earlier: it translated systematically, hungrily, and with state and church patronage. The direction of the intellectual gradient is not in dispute; European scholars traveled to the frontier zones because that was where the books were.

The Centers

Toledo. Reconquered by Castile in 1085 with its Arabic libraries intact, Toledo became the greatest translation center. Gerard of Cremona (c. 1114–1187) came seeking Ptolemy's Almagest, stayed a lifetime, and translated (with a team, including the Mozarab Galib) over seventy works: the Almagest itself, Euclid's Elements (from Arabic), al-Khwarizmi's Algebra, al-Nayrizi's Euclid commentary, the Banu Musa's geometry (Verba filiorum), Jabir ibn Aflah's Islah (spherical trigonometry), al-Farghani's astronomy, and much of the medical corpus. His students' memorial list of his translations is a foundational document of European science.

The Ebro valley and the north of Spain. Robert of Chester translated al-Khwarizmi's Algebra at Segovia in 1145, the year Latin algebra begins, and, with Hermann of Carinthia, worked on astronomical and religious texts. Plato of Tivoli translated al-Battani; Hugh of Santalla, John of Seville, and others fed the stream.

England via Spain. Adelard of Bath (fl. 1116–1142) translated Euclid's Elements from Arabic (the version that dominated Latin geometry teaching for centuries) and al-Khwarizmi's zij in Maslama's Córdoban recension, Latin Europe's first real astronomical tables with instructions.

Sicily and Italy. The trilingual Norman court (Arabic, Greek, Latin) produced translations directly from Greek as well as Arabic; later, the Alfonsine court of Castile (1250s–80s) produced the Alfonsine Tables in the Arabic zij tradition and Castilian translations of Arabic astronomy.

What Was Translated, and What Was Not

Europe received: al-Khwarizmi (algebra and arithmetic), Abu Kamil, al-Farghani, al-Battani, al-Zarqali/Toledan Tables, Jabir ibn Aflah, Ibn al-Haytham's Optics, al-Nayrizi, the Banu Musa, Thabit (partially), al-Kindi (partially), Maslama's Ptolemy material, and the philosophical corpus (Avicenna, Averroes) whose mathematical sections traveled with it.

Europe did not receive (in this period): al-Biruni, al-Karaji, al-Samawal, Khayyam's algebra, Sharaf al-Din al-Tusi, al-Kashi, the Maghrebi symbolists, or (directly) the Maragha planetary corpus. The ceiling of the tradition was far above what crossed the Pyrenees, which is why the "Islamic mathematics = preserved Greek books" cliché fails: what Europe missed was precisely the most original material, much of it recovered only by modern historians in manuscript.

The Word-Level Evidence

The translation movement is fossilized in vocabulary: algebra, algorithm, cipher/zero, sine (by mistranslation), zenith, nadir, azimuth, almanac, alidade, and dozens of star names. See Etymology.

Assessment

Charles Burnett, the leading modern student of the movement, describes twelfth-century translation as the transfusion that made the European university curriculum possible: the quadrivium got its advanced textbooks (Euclid, Ptolemy, al-Farghani, the algorismus) almost entirely through Arabic. When Europe's own creative mathematics begins, with Fibonacci, it begins explicitly as a continuation of Arabic mathematics, learned in Arabic, from Arabic teachers, in North Africa.

Sources: C. Burnett, "The Coherence of the Arabic-Latin Translation Program in Toledo" and his collected studies; Katz; Berggren; M.-T. d'Alverny, "Translations and Translators," in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century; Lindberg (ed.), Science in the Middle Ages.