By 1453 Europe had no Christian Arabic scholars despite a century of outreach

Evidence

Nothing brings more clearly before our eyes the decline in the serious interest in Islam during the previous century and a half than the great difficulty he had in finding anyone in Europe in 1453 who knew Arabic. The Spanish Moslems were now in the same position as the Spanish Christians six hundred years earlier: they had largely abandoned their language and culture for that of their conquerors. It took John of Segovia two years to secure both an Arabic text of the Koran and a Moslem jurist from Salamanca who was willing to come to Savoy to help in the translation. — R. W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle…, 484

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to The Namesake’s theme of language and cultural abandonment across generations, though in a very different register.
• QUESTION: What had the Council of Vienne 1312 decree set up, and why did it fail to produce any scholars by 1453?

Related

• Christian thought on Islam stagnated for four centuries after 1300 (similarity 0.80)
• Seventeenth-century European Orientalists pursued rigorous Arabic scholarship even in polemical works (similarity 0.79)