People who spoke Arabic and the Romance languages of Spain would first translate these books into Spanish, and these books would then be translated into Latin, which would thus make Aristotle and Ptolemy (as well as the works of Arabic philosophers) available to educated people throughout Western Europe. Once these books were in Christian hands, Raymond, archbishop of Toledo (r. Muslims had translated most of the philosophy of Aristotle into Arabic in addition to writing extensive original works that engaged with the thought of Aristotle and Plato. When Toledo fell to Christian armies in 1085, its libraries became available to the larger Christian world. Gerbert's writings show him to be particularly fascinated with Euclid, Arabic numerals, and the concept of zero. 999 - 1003), had visited Muslim-ruled Spain to read the works of ancient Greek thinkers that were unavailable elsewhere in Western Europe. As early as the tenth century, Christian scholars, such as Gerbert of Aurillac (who eventually became Pope Sylvester II2, r. Al-Andalus had been a major source of Muslim intellectual activity. The spur to this interest would come from events in Southwestern Europe. The twelfth century would see a massive shift, with an immense growth of interest in philosophy on the part of those men (and a few women) who had a formal education. But Western Europeans were familiar with very little of Aristotle's work aside from a small number of logical writings that had been translated from Greek into Latin in the sixth century. Over the eleventh century, thinkers in the monasteries of Western Europe had increasingly sought to apply the tools of logic (in particular Aristotelian logic) to the study of the Bible. Both monasteries and cathedrals were centers of education in Western Europe, even during the dark days of the tenth century.
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