Gerard of Cremona Becomes a Leading Translator from the Arabic

Between 1150 and 1175 Gerard of Cremona, in Toledo, Spain, translated Ptolemy's Almagest from Arabic into Latin. He also edited for Latin readers the Tables of Toledo, the most accurate compilation of astronomical data available in Europe at the time. The Tables were partly the work of Al-Zargali, known to the West as Arzachel, a mathematician and astronomer who flourished in Córdoba in the eleventh century.

"The most productive of the Toledo translators at that time was Gerard of Cremona,^[36] who translated 87 books,^[37] including Ptolemy's Almagest, many of the works of Aristotle, including his Posterior Analytics, Physics, On the Heavens and the World, On Generation and Corruption, and Meteorology, al-Khwarizmi's On Algebra and Almucabala, Archimedes' On the Measurement of the Circle, Aristotle, Euclid's Elements of Geometry, Jabir ibn Aflah's Elementa astronomica,^[30] Al-Kindi's On Optics, al-Farghani's On Elements of Astronomy on the Celestial Motions, al-Farabi's On the Classification of the Sciences, the chemical and medical works of al-Razi (Rhazes),^[13] the works of Thabit ibn Qurra and Hunayn ibn Ishaq,^[38] and the works of al-Zarkali, Jabir ibn Aflah, the Banu Musa, Abu Kamil, Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi, and Ibn al-Haytham (but not including the Book of Optics, because the catalog of the works of Gerard of Cremona does not list that title; however the Risner compilation of Opticae Thesaurus Septem Libri also includes a work by Witelo and also de Crepusculis, which Risner incorrectly attributed to Alhacen, and which was translated by Gerard of Cremona).^[39] The medical works he translated include Haly Abenrudian's Expositio ad Tegni Galeni; the Practica, Brevarium medicine by Yuhanna ibn Sarabiyun (Serapion); Alkindus' De Gradibus; Rhazes' Liber ad Almansorem, Liber divisionum, Introductio in medicinam, De egritudinibus iuncturarum, Antidotarium and Practica puerorum; Isaac Israeli ben Solomon's De elementis and De definitionibus;^[21] Abulcasis' Al-Tasrif as Chirurgia; Avicenna's The Canon of Medicine as Liber Canonis; and the Liber de medicamentis simplicus by Ibn Wafid (Abenguefit).^[23] At the close of the 12th and the beginning of the 13th centuries, Mark of Toledo translated the Qur'an (once again) and various medical works.^[40] He also translated Hunayn ibn Ishaq's medical work Liber isagogarum. (Wikipedia article on Latin translations of the twelfth century, accessed 9-2020).