Tenth-century Baghdad needed a chain of translators to read a Latin letter

Evidence

How did they read this message in Latin? Who could there have been in tenth-century Baghdad that could read a letter in Latin? Awhadi tells us: they searched for someone to translate the letter, and in the clothing store they found a Frankish slave who was able ‘to read the writing of that people’. He was brought into the Caliph’s presence, where he translated the letter from Latin writing into Greek writing. They then brought the famous scientific translator Ishaq ibn Hunain and he translated it from Greek into Arabic. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 148

Categorization

• QUESTION: The chain ran Latin-to-Greek-to-Arabic — implying Greek was the scholarly lingua franca of Baghdad while Latin was alien even to one of the great translation centers of the age