In 1085, Christian rulers conquered Toledo and found libraries filled with Islamic scholarship. They made a choice that would shape history: they chose not to destroy. Fifty years later, Gerard of Cremona arrived from Italy and spent his life translating eighty-seven works from Arabic to Latin---medicine, astronomy, mathematics, philosophy. Without the rulers' restraint, there would be no Gerard to remember. Without Gerard's patient work, the European Renaissance would have unfolded very differently. This is a story about the spiritual principle that knowledge belongs to humanity, that truth transcends conquest, and that the unglamorous work of transmission matters as much as original discovery.

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