gems, early lapidaries, early gemology, early mineralogy, Alfonso X El Sabio

In a solemn session held on November 23, 1921, under the presidency of King Alfonso XIII and Queen Victoria Eugenia, by the Royal Academies to “commemorate the seventh centenary of the birth of King Alfonso the Wise,” the representative of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Don Antonio Vela, included in his speech the following reference to the Wise King, which, according to F. Torroja, comes from Father Jerónimo Roldán de la Higuera: “Don Alfonso the Wise devoted all his energies to the study of history and legislation, the problems of politics and war, morality and literature, adding to all this a deep knowledge of the physical and mathematical sciences, and was concerned with freeing them from alchemy, the Kabbalah, omens, and superstitions of the occult sciences, which he sought to eliminate from true knowledge in his scientific codices […] In Toledo, he established with Arab, Jewish, and Christian astronomers a true Congress of Sciences with aims and purposes analogous to those of our modern academies […]” A similar view is defended by Fernández Vallín and Abetti.