Traveling Scholars. During the early twelfth century Western Christian scholars began traveling to cities in Spain, Sicily, Antioch and Tripoli , where they came into contact with the works of non-Christian philosophers and began translating them into Latin. The arrival of Peter the Venerable in Spain in 1142 led to the first translation of the Koran, the Muslim holy book, into Latin. In the 1240s Dalalat al-Ha'irin (Guide for the Perplexed, written 1190) by the great Jewish legal thinker and philosopher Moses Maimonides (1138-1204) of Cordoba, Spain, was translated from Arabic into Latin and discussed in Christian schools, especially at the University of Naples, where Master Peter of Ireland, the teacher of Thomas Aquinas, placed great emphasis on this work, which influenced not only Aquinas but also Meister Eckhart and other medieval thinkers. Scholar-travelers also discovered and brought home works by Arabic...