Mosque at Cordoba, city of Averroes' birth

A native of Cordoba in (Islamic) Spain, Ibn Rushd worked as a jurist and physician and conducted scientific inquiries. He is best known for his commentaries on Aristotle, in which he "rescued" the real Aristotle from his neoplatonist interpreters and defended the compatibility of Aristotle's thought with divinely revealed truth. Although Ibn Rushd found few followers in the Islamic world, his works were quickly translated into Latin, where they were avidly read by Christian theologians such as Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas and thus played a major role in the development of scholasticism. The reception in the West of Ibn Rushd's Aristotle did not, however, proceed without controversy; in 1277, the bishop of Paris condemned 219 errors of the "radical Aristotelians" or "Latin Averroists" teaching at the University of Paris.