a high regard for “Saracen” learning and wrote that Christians had gone to Muslim Spain
to seek out manuscripts on the liberal arts and “physics” (the study of nature). Peter’s
main purpose in stimulating the translation of Arabic texts into Latin, however, lay in
trying to understand Islamic religion in order thereby to find ways of converting the
Muslims. Translations of the Qur’an and of other Islamic religious writings were
collected with Peter’s polemical and apologetic writings against Islam to form the so-
called Corpus/Collectio Toletanum/a. This collection was employed extensively to
counter Islam throughout the Middle Ages; it was still being quoted by Nicholas of Cusa,
Denis the Carthusian, and Torquemada in the 15th century.
From ca. 1150, translations began to appear of Arab philosophers and of arabicized
Greek authors. Central to this movement was the Spanish city of Toledo, which had been
taken by the Christians in 1085. While scientific works continued to receive attention,
Dominicus Gundissalinus (d. after 1181), archdeacon of Toledo, in collaboration with Ibn
Dawud (Avendeath; fl. 1150), was perhaps the greatest of the early translators of Muslim
and Jewish philosophical works. He translated works by Ibn Sina, al-Ghazali, and the
Jewish thinker Ibn Gabirol (Avicebron; ca.1021– ca.1058), but no doubt his most
important work was a synthesis of Arabic and Latin scholarship in four of his own works:
De anima, De unitate, De divisione philosophiae, and De processione mundi. Through
this work, western philosophers of the Middle Ages were stimulated to discuss
psychological, noetic, and epistemological problems in the context of a Neoplatonic
Avicennan reading of Aristotle. Traces of Gundissalinus’s efforts can be found in a
succession of authors from William of Auvergne (1180/ 90–1249) to Bonaventure (ca.
1217–1274), Albert the Great (ca. 1200–1280) and Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1224–1274).
The Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides (1135–1204), who wrote in Arabic, was also
translated and often used. Aquinas derived his third way of proving that God exists from
Maimonides’s analysis. The Neoplatonism of Ibn Sina, al-Ghazali, and Ibn Gabirol’s
Fons vitae found fertile ground in the developing Augustinian, Pseudo-Dionysian,
Chartrian, and Victorine Platonist interpretations of Christian theology; for example, a
form of Ibn Gabirol’s doctrine on matter was fundamental to Bonaventure’s conception
of all created beings, including souls and angels, as partly material, and thus made its way
into Franciscan spirituality.
Increasingly, western scholars began to be interested in the Aristotelian corpus. A
generation after Gundissalinus, translations from the Arabic were taken up with great
vigor by Michael Scot (d. ca. 1236), who worked in Spain but also in the scientific
environment of the Sicilian court of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen. To get an impression
of the influx of Latin versions of the Arabic Aristotle and his Muslim commentators in
the University of Paris, the following can be noted. The Statutes of the Arts Faculty in
1255 prescribed the study of Aristotle from the following works (the availability of a
translation from the Arabic is noted in parentheses): Ethics, Physics (translated by Gerard
of Cremona and Michael Scot), Metaphysics (translated by Michael Scot, who also
translated Ibn Rushd’s great commentary on it), De animalibus (translated by Michael
Scot), De caelo (translated by Gerard of Cremona and Michael Scot), Metereologica
(translated by Henricus Aristippus and Michael Scot), De anima (translation by Michael
Scot, who also translated Ibn Rushd’s commentary on it), De generatione et corruptione
(translated by Gerard of Cremona), the Pseudo-Aristotelian De causis, actually by
Proclus (translated by Gerard of Cremona), De somno (translation of Ibn Rushd’s
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