Toletum library

[Conal]

Hi

I understand that a library of 400,000 books may have survived the break up of the Empire. Does anyone have a source for info on this please?

Cheers

Conal

[Jona Lendering]

The Iberian peninsula, under Visigothic rule, indeed appears to have been an enclave of literacy. Isidore of Seville had a large library: 400 books. The Acts of the seventeen Councils of Toletum show a government that came close to the standards set by the Late Roman Empire. The Emirs of Cordoba appear to have continued this tradition, some of the librarians (e.g., Ibn Hazm) becoming famous authors themselves. Roger Collins has written nice things about literacy in the Visigothic kingdom.

Still, a library with 400,000 books sounds highly unlikely to me. Alexandria is supposed to have had 400,000 scrolls, which is often regarded as an implausibly high figure (you need 200 copiists to keep the collection up-to-date). I can hardly imagine that a collection of 400,000 books (which were even more expensive) has ever existed in Antiquity.

[Carlton Bach]

This could be a garbling in transmission. 400,000 is a number often quoted for medieval Toledo in the age of Muslim Spain, though I have never seen the origin of that particular figure (and have seen it quoted for the great library, all libraries, or all books in the city). The most likely explanation is that it represents a generous guesstimate, but it may not be completely off given the obsessive bibliophilia of the upper classes.

Isidore of Seville is a popular figure in the current strand of revisionism that seeks to minimise the contribution of Arabic-speaking scholars to the 12th-century 'renaissance'. It's easy to see how the two get put together.

In either case, both Isidore's 400 books and the 400,000 (which probably means 'a lot' in real numbers) would not have been direct survivals from antiquity except in very rare cases. Books survive for centuries by virtue of either not being used or being venerated and really well preserved. Isidore used his library very actively. Their content, though, very often did go back that far. In Isidore's case, probably all of it would have been classics of Greco-Roman secular and patristic literature.