Translations, not only of the medical writers, but of an indiscriminate crowd of authors in philosophy and general literature, came from his pen.

He furnished one of the first translations of the famous "Almagest" of Ptolemy, which opened the eyes of his contemporaries to the value of the Alexandrian astronomy.( 18) Leclerc gives a list of seventy-one works from his hand.
(18) For an account of that remarkable work see German translation by Manitius, Leipzig, 1912.
Many of the translators of the period were Jews, and many of the works were translated from Hebrew into Latin.

For years Arabic had been the learned language of the Jews, and in a large measure it was through them that the Arabic knowledge and the translations passed into South and Central Europe.
The Arab writer whose influence on mediaeval thought was the most profound was Averroes, the great commentator on Aristotle.
THE RISE OF THE UNIVERSITIES THE most striking intellectual phenomenon of the thirteenth century is the rise of the universities.

The story of their foundation is fully stated in Rashdall's great work (Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, Oxford, 1895).

Monastic and collegiate schools, seats of learning like Salernum, student guilds as at Bologna, had tried to meet the educational needs of the age.