The old Visigothic capital on the Tagus, a great taifa city taken by Alfonso VI in 1085 and thereafter a Christian stronghold and famous centre of translation.
Toledo stands on a granite height almost encircled by the river Tagus in the centre of the Iberian Peninsula, a natural fortress that made it a capital in every age. It was the seat of the Visigothic kings, and under Muslim rule the centre of one of the strongest taifa kingdoms.
Its capture by Alfonso VI in 1085 was the great symbolic prize of the eleventh-century Reconquista, restoring the old royal capital to Christian rule and giving Castile a fortress-city at the heart of the peninsula.
After 1085 Toledo became the primatial archiepiscopal see of Spain, yet it retained large Muslim and Jewish communities, and its surviving medieval fabric — Visigothic, Islamic and Christian — reflects that layered history. The little mosque of Bab al-Mardum, built in 999 and later a church, is one of its finest Islamic monuments.
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Toledo became famous as a centre of translation, where scholars rendered Arabic and Hebrew works of philosophy and science into Latin, channelling much of the learning of al-Andalus into Christian Europe.