Arabian philosophers. Of still greater importance for the Christian West was the work of Jews and Christians in Spain and Provence, in translating the Arabic versions of Aristotle into Latin, sometimes directly, and sometimes first into Hebrew and then into Latin. They attempted a literal translation, which, however, frequently failed to give the significance even of the Arabic version. These Arabic-Latin translations were of primary importance for the first introduction of Aristotle to the theologian philosophers of Christian Europe.
They were not to remain the only ones. In the twelfth century, a number of Western scholars made excursions into the East; and the capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204 enlarged their opportunities of studying the Greek language and philosophy. Attempts at direct translation into Latin began. One of the first translators was the sturdy Englishman, Robert Grosseteste. He was born in Suffolk about 1175; studied at Lincoln, then at Oxford, then at Paris, whence he returned to become Chancellor of the University of Oxford. He was made Bishop of Lincoln in 1236, and died seventeen years later. It was he who laid the foundation of the study of Greek at Oxford, and Roger Bacon was his pupil. But the most important and adequate translations were the work of two Dominicans, the Fleming, William of Moerbeke, and Henry of Brabant, who translated the works of Aristotle at the instance of Thomas Aquinas, possibly all working together at Rome, in 1263 and the years following. Aquinas recognized the inadequacy of the older translations, and based his own Aristotelian Commentaries upon these made by his collaborators, learned in the Greek tongue. The joint labour of translation and commentary seems to have been undertaken at the command of Pope Urban IV., who had renewed the former prohibitions put upon the use of Aristotle at the Paris University, in the older, shall we say, Averroistic versions.
If these prohibitions, which did not touch the logical treatises, were meant to be taken absolutely, such had been far from their effect In 1210 and again in 1215, an interdict was put upon the naturalis philosophia and the methafisica of the Stagirite. It was not revoked, but rather
