i3z RENAISSANCES

between the conquerors and the conquered than a Constantinople that
was captured by another band of the same Western Christian aggressors
in A.D. 1204. It was thus psychologically easier for Medieval Western
Christian scholars to take delivery of Hellenic cultural treasures of
which the Muslims happened to be 'carriers' than it was for them to
incur a corresponding cultural debt to other alien 'carriers' who were
schismatic Byzantine Greek Orthodox Christians; and subjugated
Byzantine Greeks, on their side, may have been less ready than subju-
gated Muslims were to share their Hellenic cultural riches with their
new Prankish masters.

In another context1 we have noticed that, when, under the successively
unfurled banners of Nestorianism, Monophysitism, and Islam, a Syriac
World that was progressively liberating itself from an Hellenic ascen-
dancy had simultaneously opened its mind to receive the Hellenic cul-
ture, it had not taken delivery of this alien culture as a whole, but had
confined its interest in Hellenism to the two intellectual provinces of
Philosophy and Physical Science. An Hellenic philosophy and physical
science, not an integral Hellenic culture, was thus the legacy of Hellen-
ism that Medieval Western scholars found accessible to them, through
the good offices of Muslim middlemen, in the cultural forum of an
eleventh-century Palermo or Toledo, and it is notorious that, in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a Western scholarship that had pre-
viously failed to take advantage of the legacy of an Hellenic Boethius did
show the same zest, energy, and acumen in profiting by its opportunities
of mastering Hellenic philosophy and science through an Arabic medium
at Palermo and Toledo as it was to show thereafter, in the fifteenth
century, in acquiring the literary culture of Hellenism, in its Ancient
Greek original dress, from a handful of Byzantine Greek refugees.

The speed, enterprise, and determination with which Western scholar-
ship turned to account the opportunities offered at Toledo are particu-
larly impressive.2 One of the earliest of the series of translators who
laboured there, Dominic Gondisalvi, who set to work at the instigation
of the Western Catholic Christian Archbishop of Toledo, Raymond
(fungebatur circa A.D. 1130-50), translated into Latin a running transla-
tion—made for him orally, into Castilian out of Arabic, by a bilingual
Andalusian Jew, Johanan ben David ('Avendeath') of Seville—of the
Muslim savants' commentaries on Aristotle and original works in the
philosophical and scientific fields.3 The earliest maker, at Toledo, of
Latin translations of the existing Arabic translations of Hellenic philo-
sophical and scientific works was a Gerard of Cremona (obiit A.D. 1187);
and this Lombard translator at Toledo was followed by a Michael Scot
(who is believed to have learnt his Arabic at Palermo), by a German
Hermann, and by an English Alfred (florebat A.D. 1215-70),*

* In IX. viii. 408.

z See Sandys, J. E.: A History of Classical Scholarship from the Sixth Century #,C. to

------,_-__,—„.-----.......---------0—„,* arabes employes pa\

docteurs scholastiques (ist ed. 1817; and ed. 1843),

3 See Sandys, ibid., pp. S39*~4°- 4 See ibid., pp. 540 and 543-7,