Toledo

Visigothic Spain held its church councils at Toledo, and they were assemblies of the kingdom as much as of the church, issuing law alongside doctrine. The third of them, in 589, is the decisive one: King Reccared renounced the Arian Christianity his people had held for two centuries and brought the Gothic nobility and clergy with him into the Catholic faith of the Hispano-Roman population. The kingdom's two peoples were now one church, and the councils that followed legislated for it in detail.

The acts of that council also contain the earliest well attested use of the creed with the word filioque, the assertion that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. It was added in a local setting to close off any Arian reading, and it spread from Spain into Frankish usage and eventually into the Roman rite. The Greek churches regarded the insertion into a creed agreed by an ecumenical council as illegitimate whatever its content, and it became the standing doctrinal grievance between east and west, argued over at Florence eight hundred years later.

The same councils legislated harshly against Jews, ordering forced baptism, removing children from families and setting conditions for converts, and that is part of the record too. Toledo also kept the old Iberian liturgy, later called Mozarabic, which survived the Roman standardisation and was given a permanent chapel in the cathedral around 1500 so that it would not be lost. It is celebrated there still.

Toledo fell to Castile in 1085 with its Arabic libraries and its Arabic speaking Christian and Jewish populations intact, and for a century and a half it was where Latin Europe went to get books. Gerard of Cremona came looking for Ptolemy's astronomy, stayed, learned Arabic and produced some seventy translations, including works of Aristotle, Euclid, Galen and Avicenna. The usual method needed two people: a Jewish or Mozarabic scholar read the Arabic aloud in Castilian, and a Latinist wrote it down in Latin, so the transmission was collaborative and interfaith by necessity. Alfonso X later had a comparable body of work produced in Castilian rather than Latin.

The consequences were enormous. The Aristotle that Paris and Oxford argued over for the next three centuries arrived by this route, together with the commentaries of Ibn Rushd and the philosophical theology of Ibn Sina and of Ibn Gabirol, whose Fountain of Life circulated in Latin without anyone realising its author was Jewish.

The city's two surviving synagogues show the other side of the story. Santa Maria la Blanca was built as a synagogue in Almohad style by Muslim craftsmen for a Jewish congregation under Christian rule, and El Transito was raised in the fourteenth century by the treasurer of Castile, with Hebrew and Arabic inscriptions across its walls. Both were taken over as churches, the first after the violence of 1391 and the second after the expulsion of 1492, and both stand today as museums of what the city stopped being.