Hello, friend.
Welcome back. I'm glad you're here for this one.
Last time, we sat with Robert of Ketton in a garden in Toledo, watching him wrestle with translating the Qur'an into Latin. Robert was part of that remarkable generation of scholars who gathered in Spain to recover knowledge that Europe had lost---translating Arabic texts, learning from Islamic teachers, building bridges between civilizations.
Robert and his colleagues---Gerard of Cremona, Hermann of Carinthia, all those patient translators---they planted seeds. They did the hard, careful work of preservation and transmission. They turned Arabic manuscripts into Latin texts that European scholars could read.
But seeds only matter if they grow into something.
Today I want to tell you about a man who represents what happened next. What grew from all that planting. A Scottish scholar who took the knowledge flowing out of Toledo and carried it to the universities of Europe---to Bologna, to Paris, to Oxford. A man who fed the intellectual hunger of a whole generation.
His name was Michael Scot.
And the legends that grew up around him? They're wilder than you might imagine.
This is our final episode in this series, friend. We've traced a golden thread from the preservation of Islamic libraries through the translation movement in Spain. Now we'll follow it to its fruition---to the transformation of European thought that made the Renaissance possible.
But first, let me tell you about Michael. And about the demon horse.
It's midnight in Sicily. Late June, 1225, maybe 1226. Midsummer is tomorrow---back home in Scotland, the longest day of the year, when the sun barely sets and the old rituals wake up from winter sleep. When families gather and fires are lit on hilltops and the boundary between worlds feels thin.
Michael Scot hasn't been home in years. Too much work, too many manuscripts, too many questions from Emperor Frederick II who keeps him busy translating Aristotle and calculating the movements of stars. But Midsummer---that pulls at him. He needs to be there. Needs to see the hills, his family, the light that lasts all night long.
The problem is simple: Sicily to Scotland is weeks of travel. Maybe a month if the weather's bad. Roads through Italy, over the Alps, across France, through England, and finally north into the Borders. Weeks he doesn't have.
So at midnight, Michael goes to the stables.
There's a horse waiting there. Massive. Black as the spaces between stars. Its eyes glow like coals banked in a forge. Steam rises from its nostrils even though the Sicilian night is warm. When it breathes, you can hear something underneath the sound---like distant thunder, or a growl, or a language no human speaks.
The stable hands won't go near it. They cross themselves when they pass. They say it's not a horse at all. They say Michael keeps a demon bound in the shape of a beast, that he learned how to bind it from forbidden Arabic texts, that riding it costs something---maybe not your life, but something.
Michael doesn't look afraid. He has a leather satchel slung across his shoulder---heavy with manuscripts, astronomical tables, a gift for his mother wrapped in silk. He approaches the horse and whispers something. Arabic, maybe. Or older than Arabic. Older than Latin. A word that makes the air shiver.
The horse lowers its head. Allows him to mount.
Michael settles into the saddle, grips the mane---coarse and hot under his fingers like touching a furnace---and leans forward.
"Home," he whispers.
The horse explodes into motion.
Thunder across the cobblestones of Palermo---sparks flying from iron hooves striking stone. Dogs howl. People jolt awake and peer from windows to see a dark shape hurtling past, too fast to be natural. They cross themselves. Lock their doors.
Up through Italy in darkness. The horse never slows, never tires. Over the Alps before dawn---hooves somehow finding purchase on ice and stone where no horse should be able to climb. Through German forests where wolves scatter and hide. And then France.
In a village outside Lyon, a farmer wakes to thunder. But the sky is clear---stars bright overhead, no storm clouds anywhere. The thunder gets louder, closer. The ground shakes. His wife grabs his arm, terrified. "What is it? What's coming?"
And then they see it through their window: a massive dark shape racing past on the road, moving faster than any living thing should move. A rider bent low over its neck, cloak streaming behind him like black wings. The sound of hooves like drums of war. And then---gone. Vanished into the night heading north.
The farmer and his wife stare at each other in the sudden silence.
"Demon," she whispers.
He nods. Makes the sign of the cross. They'll tell the story at market for years: the night the devil himself rode past their door.
But Michael Scot isn't thinking about frightened farmers. He's thinking about home. About Midsummer fires on Scottish hilltops. About arriving just as dawn breaks over the Eildon Hills.
The horse thunders on. Through sleeping France. Across the channel somehow---don't ask me how. Through England in the dark hours before morning.
And then, just as the sun begins to rise on the longest day of the year, they're galloping across the Scottish Borders. The Eildon Hills rising in the distance, three peaks against the lightening sky. The horse's hooves kicking up dirt from roads Michael remembers from childhood.
He pulls the reins. The horse slows, stops. Steam rises from its flanks. Its eyes still glow.
Michael dismounts. His legs are shaking. The satchel is still secure across his shoulder---manuscripts intact, gift unbroken.
He turns to look at the horse. It watches him with those coal-fire eyes. And then---like smoke dispersing---it's gone. Vanished. Nothing left but hoof prints in the dirt and the smell of sulfur.
Michael Scot walks the last mile home on foot, carrying knowledge from the Emperor's court in Sicily, arriving just in time for Midsummer.
That's the legend, anyway.
The story people told about Michael Scot the wizard. The man who commanded demons and rode through the night on supernatural steeds.
But let me tell you what was really magical about him.
Michael Scot was born in Scotland around 1175, probably in the Borders near those Eildon Hills. I don't know much about his childhood---he came from a family with some means, enough to send a bright boy south for education.
And Michael was bright.
He studied at Oxford first, then Paris. The great universities were just beginning to take shape then, hungry for texts, for knowledge, for anything that could feed the intellectual awakening happening across Europe. Michael learned Latin, obviously. Logic. Theology. The standard curriculum.
But it wasn't enough for him.
So he went to Toledo.
By the time Michael arrived in Spain---probably around 1215 or so---the translation movement was in full swing. Gerard of Cremona had been dead for decades, but his work lived on. Hermann of Carinthia's students had students. Robert of Ketton's Qur'an translation was circulating. Toledo had become the place you went if you wanted to learn Arabic, if you wanted access to the texts that were transforming European thought.
Michael studied there for years. Learned Arabic properly---not just enough to stumble through, but enough to translate complex philosophical and scientific works. He absorbed everything he could: astronomy, mathematics, natural philosophy, the whole corpus of knowledge that Islamic scholars had preserved and expanded.
And then he started translating.
Aristotle's works on animals, on the heavens, on natural philosophy. But not just Aristotle---he translated the commentaries too. Especially Averroes, the great Islamic philosopher from Córdoba who had written extensive commentaries on Aristotle's works. Michael understood something crucial: you couldn't just translate Aristotle's Greek-to-Arabic-to-Latin and call it done. You needed the Islamic scholarly tradition that had been wrestling with these texts for centuries.
From Toledo, Michael moved to Bologna. Then to Sicily.
And Sicily---that's where things got interesting.
Emperor Frederick II was unlike any other ruler in medieval Europe. They called him Stupor Mundi---the Wonder of the World. He spoke six languages. He questioned everything. He kept a menagerie of exotic animals. He wrote a book on falconry that's still considered scientifically valuable today. He asked questions that made church authorities nervous.
And he collected scholars the way other kings collected jewels.
Michael Scot became Frederick's court philosopher and astrologer. Not because Frederick believed in magic---though he appreciated a good trick---but because Frederick was hungry for knowledge. Real knowledge. The kind that came from those Arabic manuscripts Michael could read and translate.
This is what I need you to understand: to most people in medieval Europe, what Michael knew looked like sorcery.
He could predict eclipses. Calculate the movements of planets. Explain why the stars appeared in different positions at different times of year. He could read books in a language that seemed mysterious and exotic. He understood mathematics that baffled educated men. He knew things about the natural world---about animals, about the heavens, about how things worked---that nobody else could explain.
Where did this knowledge come from? It must be demons. It must be forbidden arts. It must be dangerous.
The irony is almost too perfect. Michael wasn't conjuring spirits or commanding demons. He was translating Aristotle. He was reading astronomical tables compiled by Islamic scholars. He was studying natural philosophy---the careful observation of how the world actually works.
But to people who didn't understand the chain of transmission, who didn't know that Islamic civilization had preserved and expanded Greek learning for centuries while Europe forgot it, Michael's knowledge seemed supernatural.
The "demon horse" legend captures this perfectly. Michael did travel impossibly fast between centers of learning. Not on a supernatural steed, but through letters, through manuscripts copied and carried by messengers, through his own physical journeys when necessary. He was constantly in motion---intellectually if not physically---racing knowledge from one place to another.
I want you to see the whole arc now, because this is where it all comes together.
Years earlier, I watched Christian armies reconquer Toledo and Córdoba. I held my breath, wondering what they would do with those magnificent libraries---shelves and shelves of Arabic manuscripts containing centuries of Islamic scholarship. They could have burned them. They had every reason to, by the logic of their time. The spoils of war. The books of the enemy.
They didn't.
They preserved them instead. And that one decision---that moment of restraint and curiosity---made everything else possible.
Gerard of Cremona came to those libraries and spent his life translating. Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy---Greek knowledge preserved in Arabic, now rendered into Latin. Europe getting back its own intellectual heritage, expanded and enriched by Islamic scholars who had studied these texts for generations.
Hermann of Carinthia sat with Muslim teachers and learned astronomy the way they taught it. Not just copying their conclusions but understanding their methods, their questions, their way of seeing the world.
Robert of Ketton translated the Qur'an itself, spending years inside Islamic sacred text, learning what devotion meant to them, what they believed and why.
And now Michael Scot takes all of that---all those translations, all that recovered knowledge---and feeds it directly into the universities of Europe.
I watched him do it. Watched manuscripts travel from his hands to lecture halls in Bologna, Paris, Oxford. Watched young scholars encounter Aristotle's natural philosophy for the first time and have their minds blown open. Watched them read Averroes' commentaries and realize that Islamic scholars had been wrestling with these same questions for centuries and had insights Europe desperately needed.
The universities were hungry. Starving, really, for exactly what Michael carried. They'd been subsisting on the limited texts available in Latin---important works, yes, but incomplete. A fraction of what had once been known.
Michael brought them a feast.
We're living through our own translation movement right now. You might not see it that way, but we are.
Think about the pattern: Islamic scholars preserved Greek knowledge in Arabic. Christian translators rendered it into Latin---the language of universities, the language that let knowledge flow across Europe. Latin became the bridge. And that bridge made the Renaissance possible.
Today, digital formats are our Latin. Our universal language of transmission. The way knowledge crosses boundaries and reaches people who would never have access otherwise.
And just like in Michael Scot's time, there's a choice being made right now about what knowledge we preserve and what we let disappear.
Right there in Juneau Alaska where the Chronicler lives, in the Walter Soboleff Building---Sealaska Heritage Institute is doing what those Toledo libraries did. They're preserving knowledge that could be lost. Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian languages. Traditional arts. Ethnographic archives. Oral histories. What the Elders called "the container of wisdom."
But they're not just preserving it in locked archives. They're translating it into digital formats. Online language courses so people anywhere can learn Tlingit. YouTube streams of Celebration so cultural transmission happens beyond physical presence. Digital databases of traditional knowledge. Websites that make centuries of indigenous wisdom accessible globally.
This is happening everywhere. Indigenous communities across the world making the same choice those Christian rulers made in Toledo: preserve or destroy? Share or hoard? Trust that knowledge can cross boundaries, or fear what happens when it does?
The Sámi in Scandinavia digitizing their traditional knowledge. Aboriginal Australians creating online archives of Dreamtime stories. Māori in New Zealand preserving te reo through apps and digital platforms. Native American tribes across the continent recording elder knowledge before it's gone.
They're all choosing preservation. Choosing transmission. Choosing to make knowledge available in forms that can travel---the way Gerard's translations traveled from Toledo to Paris, the way Michael's manuscripts fed universities across Europe.
And here's what I need you to understand: this indigenous knowledge, these non-Western ways of understanding the world---they contain wisdom we desperately need.
Traditional ecological knowledge about living sustainably with the land. Indigenous understanding of community and relationship. Ways of thinking about time, about responsibility to future generations, about balance between human needs and the natural world. Medical knowledge from plants and practices developed over millennia. Languages that contain concepts we don't even have words for in English.
This isn't romantic nostalgia. This is practical wisdom that Western science is only now beginning to recognize the value of. Climate scientists consulting with indigenous communities who've been tracking environmental changes for generations. Medical researchers studying traditional healing practices. Ecologists learning from indigenous land management techniques.
Just like Europe needed the knowledge Islamic civilization had preserved---needed it to emerge from intellectual stagnation---we need knowledge that exists in traditions we've dismissed or ignored.
But it only works if we're curious. If we're humble enough to learn from knowledge systems different from our own.
The European universities could have rejected Arabic texts as "foreign" or "suspicious." Some people did. But enough scholars were hungry enough, curious enough, to engage with what they found. To let Averroes teach them new ways of reading Aristotle. To let Islamic astronomical tables expand their understanding of the heavens.
That's the question facing us now: Will we engage with the knowledge being preserved and shared today? Will we learn from it? Or will we dismiss it because it comes from traditions we don't understand, languages we don't speak, worldviews that challenge our assumptions?
So let me ask you something, friend.
What knowledge are you carrying?
I don't mean facts you've memorized or degrees you've earned. I mean---what understanding do you have that needs to travel? What have you learned that someone else needs to know? What wisdom was given to you that you're responsible for passing forward?
And where does it need to go?
Michael Scot carried Aristotle from Toledo to Bologna, from Sicily to Paris. He was a bridge. Whether he rode a demon horse or traveled by normal means, he was moving knowledge from one place to another, from one generation to another. That was his work.
You have work like that too. We all do.
Maybe it's knowledge from your own tradition that younger people need to hear. Maybe it's understanding you've gained about your craft, your community, your patch of earth. Maybe it's wisdom someone taught you that can't be allowed to die with your generation.
Whatever it is---are you preserving it? Are you translating it into forms that can travel? Are you brave enough to share it across boundaries with people who might not initially understand?
And here's the other question: What knowledge do you need to receive?
What traditions exist around you---maybe right in your own city---that you've never bothered to learn from? What "containers of wisdom" are being offered that you've dismissed because they seem unfamiliar or foreign or not meant for you?
Michael's generation had to learn from Islamic scholars. Had to admit that another civilization possessed knowledge they desperately needed. Had to get over their pride and their fear and their assumptions about who could teach them truth.
What are you too proud to learn? Who are you too afraid to listen to?
The seeds planted in one generation don't always fruit in that same generation. Those Toledo translators never saw the Renaissance. They died before their work fully transformed Europe. But they did the work anyway. They preserved, they translated, they transmitted.
You might not see what your preservation efforts enable. Might not witness the renaissance that comes from the knowledge you carry forward or the wisdom you're humble enough to receive.
But the pattern holds. It's held for centuries.
Curiosity and humility across boundaries---that's what unlocks human potential. That's what allows knowledge to flow. That's what plants seeds that bloom into beauty we can barely imagine.
So carry what you've been given. Receive what's being offered. Trust that understanding matters even when you can't see the full outcome.
Be a bridge.
That's what Michael was. That's what we all can be.
We've come a long way together, you and I.
We started in the great library of Córdoba with Lubna, the brilliant woman who catalogued thousands of manuscripts and copied texts with her own hand. We met Caliph al-Hakam who built that library, who sent agents across the world to gather knowledge. Hasdai ibn Shaprut, the Jewish physician and diplomat who brought scholars together across faiths.
We watched Ibn Rushd and Ibn Tufayl wrestle with Aristotle and push philosophy forward, creating commentaries that would transform European thought centuries later.
And then the translators: Gerard of Cremona rendering Arabic texts into Latin. Hermann of Carinthia learning directly from Islamic teachers. Robert of Ketton translating the Qur'an itself, speaking someone else's prayers until he understood what they meant.
And finally Michael Scot---carrying all that preserved, expanded, translated knowledge to the universities of Europe, feeding minds hungry for wisdom they'd lost.
Centuries of work. Generations of scholars---Muslim, Jewish, Christian---all choosing preservation over destruction, curiosity over fear, understanding over conquest.
The golden thread running through all these stories is the same: genuine curiosity about knowledge, intellectual humility, the courage to learn from traditions different from our own. That's what unlocks human potential. That's what allows wisdom to flow across boundaries and create beauty we couldn't have imagined.
And we're still living that pattern. Still making those same choices every day. What will we preserve? What will we translate? Who will we learn from? What bridges will we build?
I hope these stories have shown you that those choices matter. That the seeds you plant today might bloom centuries from now in ways you'll never see. That curiosity is never wasted. That understanding is always worth the effort.
Thank you for walking this journey with me. For listening to these stories. For thinking about what they might mean for your own life.
May you find your gardens. Your translations. Your moments of wonder.
May you be brave enough to learn and generous enough to teach.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.