Simon R. Doubleday

“There is no pleasure in this world like the company of friends,” said the Mouse, “and no pain like losing them.”
― Simon R. Doubleday, The Wise King: A Christian Prince, Muslim Spain, and the Birth of the Renaissance

“But Alfonso was no mere historian. Living long before the modern divide into “two cultures”—the sciences and the humanities—he was a renaissance man avant la lettre, multifaceted and as committed to the sciences as to the arts, and it is here, above all, that the deepest roots of the image of the Wise King are revealed. Muslim models of rulership largely inspired his fascination with the “philosophy of nature,” especially with the related fields of astronomy, astrology, and magic. Some of these models were very old, harkening back to the golden days of the caliphate in Baghdad. There, in the ninth and tenth centuries, the caliphs of the Abbasid dynasty—anxious to soak up the ancient Greek learning of the Hellenistic world that they were conquering—had founded a school of translation that came to be known as the House of Wisdom.”
― Simon R. Doubleday, The Wise King: A Christian Prince, Muslim Spain, and the Birth of the Renaissance