Plaza de Maslama al-Mayriti

The square’s name points to the first great scholar Madrid produced. Maslama al-Mayriti was born around the year 950 in Mayrit, the border town the Andalusis had built a few decades earlier and from which the city’s name derives. His epithet, al-Mayriti, means “the Madrilenian.” He went to Córdoba, capital of the caliphate, and there became the most renowned astronomer in al-Andalus, so much so that some called him the Euclid of Hispania. He adapted al-Khwarizmi’s astronomical tables to the meridian of Córdoba, took part in translating Ptolemy’s Planisphere, and left a treatise on astrolabes still kept at El Escorial. He also founded a school that spread mathematics across the peninsula. His work traveled far: in the twelfth century an English scholar translated his tables into Latin, and through that door the calculations of a Madrilenian from the year 1000 reached the universities of Christian Europe.