By the twelfth century Toledo had become a center of study...

By the twelfth century Toledo had become a center of study as scholars from all over Europe came to work with native speakers of Arabic. As corroborated by J.B. Trend, The gates of oriental learning and story were opened both to Spain and to the whole of Europe by the capture of Toledo (1085), which became a school of translation from oriental languages.

As early as 1120 Petrus Alfonsi, a Spanish Jew who was baptized and whose godfather was Alfonso VII, introduced Indian fable into Spain by the celebrated collection of stories known as Disciplina Clericalis. The Spanish translation of the 'Indian tales' of Calila e Dimna made directly from the Arabic text dates from 1251.

When "Toledo, the greatest center of Muslim learning in the West, fell before the Spanish Christians" also says Max Meyerhof: Latin students began to come to the new capital to admire the remains of Moorish civilization and to study the Artes Arabum. The intermediaries for the learning and later on the translation work were native Jews and former Muslim subjects (Mozarabs).

Charles and Dorothea Singer… have painted a lively picture of this collaboration, which gives a clear idea of a curious scientific syncretism. The first prominent European man of science who came to Toledo was Adelard of Bath, an English mathematician and philosopher. On the other hand a Spanish Jew converted to Christianity, Petrus Alphonsi, went to England where he became physician to Henry I and spread the science of the Muslims there for the first time.

On the contrary, there is no more need of embellishing this paper with accounts of religions in 'vertical' position as human history is drenched enough with innocent blood spilled in their name. Eschatology Eschatology is no exception to this horizontal-vertical binary. Etymologically derived from the Latin eschatos ('last' or 'farthest'), eschatology refers to the branch of theology concerned with the final events in the history of the world or the ultimate destiny of mankind.

Simply put, eschatology is a doctrine or theory (logos) of the end (eschaton) whose origin, according to Encarta Encyclopedia, is almost as old as humanity as "archeological evidence of customs in the Old Stone Age indicates a rudimentary concept of immortality. According to The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "end" here can have two meanings: First, it can mean the end of each individual human life. Second, it can mean the end of the world-or, more narrowly, of the human race.