The rock-girt city on the Tagus: capital of Visigothic Spain, the most rebellious city of the Umayyad frontier, a rich taifa kingdom taken by Alfonso VI in 1085, and the Castilian city where Arabic learning was translated for Latin Europe.
Toledo stands on a granite hill almost encircled by a deep gorge of the Tagus, a natural fortress in the middle of the Iberian peninsula. That position made it the capital of Visigothic Spain, the most rebellious city of the Umayyad frontier, the seat of a wealthy taifa kingdom, and in 1085 the first great city of al-Andalus to fall to the Christian kingdoms.
For more than two centuries after the conquest Christians, Muslims and Jews lived there under Castilian rule, and the city became the chief place where Arabic learning passed into Latin Europe. That coexistence was unequal and ended violently, but its buildings still stand: the mosque of Bab al-Mardum, two medieval synagogues, and the Gothic cathedral of archbishops who claimed primacy over the whole Spanish church.
The Roman town of Toletum became a royal city under the Visigoths. Leovigild made it his capital in the second half of the sixth century, and it remained the seat of the Visigothic kings until the Muslim conquest. At the Third Council of Toledo in 589 King Reccared renounced Arian Christianity for Catholicism, and the long series of councils held in the city made it the legislative centre of the kingdom, where bishops and nobles confirmed kings and issued laws.
The kingdom's collapse was swift. After Tariq ibn Ziyad's army destroyed King Roderic's forces in 711, Toledo was taken with little resistance in 711 or 712. Many of its Christians stayed, and as Mozarabs, Arabic-speaking Christians, they kept their own liturgy in the city's parishes for four centuries; the Mozarabic rite is still celebrated in a chapel of the cathedral.
Toledo was the capital of the Middle March, the frontier province facing the Christian north, and its people repeatedly defied Córdoba. Andalusi historians told how in 797 an Umayyad governor invited the city's leading men to a banquet and had them killed one by one as they entered, the massacre remembered as the Day of the Ditch. Toledo rebelled again for decades in the ninth century, and only in 932, after a two-year siege, did Abd al-Rahman III force it to submit.
When the caliphate of Córdoba broke apart after 1031, Toledo became the capital of the Dhu'n-Nun taifa kingdom. Under al-Ma'mun, who reigned from 1043 to 1075, it was one of the richest courts of al-Andalus: the astronomer al-Zarqali built water clocks and compiled the Toledan Tables there, and al-Ma'mun annexed Valencia and briefly held Córdoba.
Al-Ma'mun's grandson al-Qadir could not hold his inheritance. Alfonso VI of León and Castile, who had lived at the Toledan court as an exile in 1072, drew tribute from the city, restored al-Qadir after a revolt, and finally blockaded Toledo, which surrendered on 25 May 1085 on terms that protected its Muslims' property and their right to worship. Alfonso compensated al-Qadir with Valencia and took the title of emperor of all Spain.
The terms did not last. In 1086 the new archbishop, Bernard of Sédirac, and Queen Constance turned the Great Mosque into the cathedral while the king was away. The fall of Toledo also brought the Almoravids into Spain: Yusuf ibn Tashfin defeated Alfonso at the Battle of Sagrajas in 1086 and besieged Toledo in 1090, but the city held, as it did against the Almohads after their victory at the Battle of Alarcos a century later.
From the time of Archbishop Raymond in the mid-twelfth century, scholars from across Europe came to Toledo for its Arabic manuscripts and its bilingual collaborators. Gerard of Cremona translated more than seventy works there, among them Ptolemy's Almagest and Avicenna's Canon of Medicine, and translators often worked in pairs, a Mozarab or Jewish scholar rendering the Arabic aloud into the vernacular and a Latin cleric writing it down.
In the thirteenth century Alfonso X of Castile gave the work a new direction by sponsoring translations into Castilian rather than Latin, including the Alfonsine Tables compiled by Jewish astronomers in Toledo. The city's Jewish community, one of the largest in Castile, built the synagogue now called Santa María la Blanca around 1200 and, under Samuel ha-Levi, treasurer to Peter of Castile, the synagogue of El Tránsito in the 1350s. The community was devastated in the pogroms of 1391, and its survivors were expelled with the rest of Spain's Jews in 1492.
Medieval Toledo was entered from the north, the only side not guarded by the river, through gates such as the Puerta de Bisagra, and reached across the Tagus by the bridges of Alcántara and San Martín. Its steep, tight streets packed parish churches built by Muslim craftsmen in the Mudéjar style of brick and horseshoe arches. Above them rose the Gothic cathedral, begun in 1226 on the site of the old Great Mosque under Archbishop Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, the chronicler of the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa.
The Jewish quarter filled the south-western part of the hill around its synagogues; Muslim craftsmen who stayed after 1085 worked as masons and carpenters for Christian patrons; and the Alcázar on the highest ground of the eastern side looked across the gorge to the castle of San Servando, which guarded the approach to the Alcántara bridge.