What is born where three languages meet?

That time, that place

In 1085 Castile took Toledo — and did not destroy it. The Arabic libraries remained, and so did the people who could read them. Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived in the same city.

Why this question

Translate these books into Latin and Europe recovers what it lost. The problem was that almost no one commanded both Arabic and Latin.

What was found

So they worked in pairs. A Jew or a local Christian who knew Arabic read the original aloud, rendering it into the vernacular Castilian; a cleric who knew Latin listened and wrote it down in Latin. One sentence at a time, passing through a voice.

By this road Ptolemy, Euclid, and Aristotle came into Europe, and with them al-Khwarizmi and Ibn Sina. Gerard of Cremona alone rendered more than seventy books.

Though there is something to sit with: some sentences had crossed from Greek into Syriac, Syriac into Arabic, Arabic into Castilian, and Castilian into Latin — four crossings.