Resumen de Las Navas de Tolosa and Liber Alchorani: reflections on Iberian Christians and the Qur'an
Although archbishop Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada commissioned a translation of the Qur'an in conjunction the Las Navas campaign, the resulting text, Mark of Toledo's Liber Alchorani, had far less of an impact than the battle itself. Indeed, like Robert of Ketton's earlier Latin Qur'an, Mark's text scarcely circulated in Spain: intellectuals there showed virtually no interest in reading Islam's holy book in Latin until the fifteenth century. Iberia was – for most of the Middle Ages – at once the land where European intellectuals could most easily find scholars to translate the Qur'an into Latin, and the place where few were interested in reading it in translation.
