An imagined portrait of Ramon Llull by Francesc Ribalta, painted around 1620 — three centuries after his death. Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona. (Wikimedia Commons, public domain)
In the summer of 1263, in the city of Palma on the island of Majorca, a man in his early thirties sat down to write a love song. He was, by his own later account, a courtier of the usual kind — well born, well married, fond of tournaments and fine clothes, employed as the household administrator of a future king. He had a wife named Blanca, two children, and a reputation for worthless poetry. That night he got something else. He wrote, much later, that he saw Christ on the cross, suspended in the air to his right, and that the same vision came to him four more times.
His name was Ramon Llull, and the decision he made that year sent him on one of the strangest self-education projects of the Middle Ages: to convert the Muslim world to Christianity, in its own language, from its own books. There was only one problem. He did not speak Arabic.
What Llull did about that problem is the reason his story belongs in a series about learning languages. He did not go to university. He hired a teacher, moved him into his house, and gave the next nine years to the language — then wrote books in it, argued in it in front of Muslim scholars in North Africa, and spent the rest of his long life campaigning to make Europe build language schools, which it eventually did.
The Man Who Had Everything
Llull was born in Palma around 1232, into a family of Catalan settlers who had arrived with the conquest of the island by James I of Aragon three years earlier. His father had fought in that campaign and been rewarded with estates. The Majorca of Llull's childhood was a conquered island: the Muslim population that had not fled or been killed in 1229 was enslaved, and Muslims and Jews still made up a large share of the people he saw every day.
In 1257 he married Blanca Picany and had two children, Domènec and Magdalena. Through his marriage and his family connections he became seneschal — the administrator of the royal household — to the future King James II of Majorca. He composed songs, chased women, and by his own description wasted years on "worthless songs and poems and other licentious things." When he was old, looking back, he called himself a troubadour of pointless verses.
Then came the visions. He sold most of what he had, on the model of Saint Francis, and set off on pilgrimages. And out of the upheaval came a list of three intentions that shaped the next fifty years of his life:
"Ramon, while still a young man and Seneschal to the King of Majorca, was very given to composing worthless songs and poems and to doing other licentious things. One night he was sitting beside his bed, about to compose and write in his vulgar tongue a song to a lady whom he loved with a foolish love; and as he began to write this song, he looked to his right and saw our Lord Jesus Christ on the Cross, as if suspended in mid-air." — Ramon Llull, Vita coaetanea (A Contemporary Life), dictated in 1311
The three intentions were these: to give his life to God, to convert "the Saracens who in such numbers surrounded the Christians on all sides," and to write the best book in the world against the errors of the unbelievers. Two more intentions were added along the way — he resolved to see institutions founded that would teach foreign languages, and to travel and preach.
The Problem He Could Not Argue Around
Here is the moment where most medieval zealots would have started shouting. Llull instead did something that took intellectual honesty: he worked out that he could not do the job without the language.
His plan was to travel to Paris and study grammar. Friends, relatives and — crucially — the Dominican Ramon de Penyafort, one of the most influential churchmen in the Mediterranean, talked him out of it. So he returned to Majorca and began his studies at home. According to his own autobiography he "studied a bit of grammar" and then, as the modern translations put it, bought himself a Saracen, and learned the Arabic language from him.
The phrase is chilling and it needs to be said plainly: the man who taught Llull Arabic was a human being held as property. He is never named in the surviving record. The only surviving source for his existence — and for everything in this section — is Llull's own account, dictated nearly fifty years later, when Llull was seventy-nine and preparing to lobby the Council of Vienne. His story must be read with that in mind.
The Teacher He Bought
What we know about the tutor is what Llull chose to tell. Scholars disagree about how educated the man was; some argue that the educated Muslim elite had long since fled or been ransomed off Majorca, while others have tried to trace his origins to an urban Islamic society beyond the island. What is not in dispute is that for nine years, from roughly 1265 to 1274, Llull had a native speaker of Arabic living in his household, teaching him the language every day.
The relationship ended terribly. In the autobiography, Llull says that while he was away, his tutor spoke words that blasphemed Christ; that he struck the man on the mouth, forehead and face in a fury of religious zeal; and that the tutor, humiliated and enraged, got hold of a sword and attacked him. Llull was wounded in the stomach but not killed. He overpowered the man, refused to let his servants kill him, and had him locked up while he decided what to do. According to Llull's account, the decision was impossible:
"For it seemed harsh to kill the person by whose teaching he now knew the language he had so wanted to learn, that is, Arabic; on the other hand, he was afraid to set him free or to keep him longer, knowing that from then on he would not cease plotting his death." — Vita coaetanea, translated by Anthony Bonner
Llull went to an abbey and prayed for three days for guidance, got none, and came home in despair. On the way back he visited the prisoner and found that the man had hanged himself with the rope he had been bound with.
It is a grotesque scene, and it is the most honest thing in the story — a reminder that language learning has always been entangled with power. The teacher was a conquered man held captive, his knowledge extracted for his master's purposes, and the only voice in the record belongs to the master. Llull got what he paid for and the man who had taught it to him paid the price. Anyone who has ever used a language tutor should sit with that for a moment.
Nine Years of Study
What Llull built in those nine years is remarkable even allowing for exaggeration. He read widely in Latin and Arabic, absorbing both Christian and Muslim theology and philosophy — not the vocabulary of the market or the kitchen, but the technical language of Aristotelian logic and Islamic disputation. He bought and read al-Ghazali, the great Persian theologian. He gathered a small group of companions. And by 1274 he had acquired enough Arabic to be a writer of it.
The evidence for that is significant. Llull's first two works, written between 1271 and 1274, are a paraphrase of al-Ghazali's logic and the monumental Llibre de contemplació en Déu (Book of Contemplation on God), thousands of pages of theology. Two of his major works, the Llibre del gentil e los tres savis (Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men) and the Llibre de contemplació, were written at least partly in Arabic. He was, in other words, not learning Arabic to order food or read a menu. He was writing theology in it — the level of the language that requires you to hold abstract argument in your head in the target language.
Note how far this is from the way most of us study. Llull did not do tourist phrases or isolated vocabulary lists. He went straight at the books of the tradition he wanted to argue with. That single decision — learn the language through the material you actually care about — is the same principle behind the modern advice to read and listen to content you would consume in your own language.
In 1274, on Mount Randa in Majorca, he had a further illumination that gave him the design of his life's work: the Art, or Ars Magna — a combinatorial system of concepts and diagrams intended to demonstrate the truths of Christianity by logic that anyone of any faith could follow. It was philosophy built on the conviction that arguments, not the sword, were the way in.
And you can hear that conviction in his writing. In the Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men, three sages — a Christian, a Jew and a Muslim — try to reason together:
"We and the Christians agree on the text of the Law, but we disagree in interpretation and commentaries, where we reach contrary conclusions. Therefore, we cannot reach agreement based on authorities, and must seek necessary arguments by which we can agree." — Ramon Llull, Llibre del gentil e los tres savis (c. 1274–1276)
Europe's First Language Schools
Llull's campaign was that missionaries should be armed with the languages of the people they wanted to convert. In 1276, with the support of the King of Majorca, a language school for Franciscan missionaries was founded at the monastery of Miramar — a house dedicated to studying the languages of the Muslim world so that its friars could preach in them. It is one of the earliest institutional language schools in Europe.
But nobody else in Europe was interested. For the next thirty-five years Llull did the rounds of popes, kings and princes, petitioning for colleges of Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic. He was ignored, or politely deferred. Then in 1311, at the Council of Vienne, it finally happened: the council ordered the creation of chairs of Hebrew, Arabic and Chaldean at the universities of Bologna, Oxford, Paris and Salamanca, and at the papal court.
Llull was seventy-nine. It had taken him nearly four decades of travel and argument to get an institution to agree that languages were worth teaching.
Testing the Arabic Where It Lived
Llull did not leave his Arabic in the library. In about 1291 he sailed to Tunis, preached to the Muslim population and disputed with scholars in philosophy — in Arabic. He went back around 1304, writing letters to the ruler of Tunis, and again in 1314 at the age of eighty-two.
These were not safe trips. He was imprisoned and expelled at least once. In 1315 he was set upon by a crowd at Bougie, on the Algerian coast, and stoned — the traditional account says he was left for dead. He was carried to a ship bound for Majorca and either died during the voyage or shortly after arriving, in 1316, at the age of about eighty-four.
He was still working at the end. His final works date from December 1315, weeks before his death, written in a language — Catalan — that he had helped turn into a literary vehicle, alongside the Arabic he had taught himself from a captive tutor half a century earlier.
The Books That Outlived the Argument
Llull's theology did not win the Islamic world, and his Art is remembered by specialists rather than practiced by anyone. What survived is more durable.
He wrote, by common count, more than 250 works — in Catalan, Latin and Arabic, translated during his lifetime into Occitan, French and Castilian. He is credited with writing the first major work of Catalan literature, and his novel Blanquerna, the Tree of Science and the Ars brevis shaped a language that millions speak today. He was beatified in 1847.
His strange combinatorial diagrams went on to seed ideas far beyond his intentions. Gottfried Leibniz built on them; historians of logic and computation treat Llull as a distant ancestor of symbolic reasoning, and his work on the Art anticipated modern voting and election theory by roughly 450 years, before Borda and Condorcet reopened the question. A man who learned a language in order to convert people ended up a footnote in the history of mathematics — and, by accident, the founder of an educational idea that is now completely unremarkable: that if you want to speak to people, you should first learn to speak their language.
What Llull Teaches a Modern Learner
Lesson one: buy yourself a native speaker
Llull's method had exactly one component, and it was the expensive one: a native speaker, in his own house, for nine years. There is no trick in this story. No app, no technique, no mnemonic system. He arranged his life so that the language was a person he saw every day, and then he kept that arrangement for the better part of a decade. Most learners quit after three months of weekly lessons; the man started with a decade of daily contact and treated it as the price of entry.
Lesson two: learn the language of the thing you want to do
Llull started with al-Ghazali and Aristotle, not with greetings. He needed to argue theology, so he learned theology's Arabic — the hard, abstract register — and skipped the easy register entirely. Your version of this: if you want to read novels, read novels; if you want to work in a hospital, learn hospital words. Purpose-shaped study reaches useful competence faster than general study, because it never spends a day on language you will not use.
Lesson three: nine years is the honest number
Llull's timeline is a useful corrective to marketing. Modern research puts a hard language like Arabic at roughly 2,200 hours of focused instruction for an English speaker — a range covered in our article on the FSI's difficulty data. Nine years of daily household contact is a perfectly reasonable way to accumulate those hours. He was not a prodigy. He was a man with a purpose, a teacher, and a long calendar.
Lesson four: start late, and keep going
Llull began Arabic at around thirty-three and was still writing and arguing in it at eighty-two. Between those two points lay half a century of use — far more learning than the initial course ever delivered. The research on the critical period shows that starting as an adult costs you an accent, not a language. Llull is the longer-term evidence: the skill does not expire if you keep using it.
Lesson five: build the thing that outlasts you
The most impressive part of Llull's story is not his Arabic. It is that he understood the problem was structural. Individual missionaries learning languages one at a time would never scale, so he spent thirty-five years campaigning for institutions — and won, at seventy-nine, when the universities of Europe agreed to teach the languages of the world. He was a mediocre politician and a stubborn one, and the stubbornness is what left a mark.
There is a small, strange dignity in the image of the man at the end: a former troubadour who wasted his youth on love songs, stoned on a North African shore at eighty-two, carried onto a ship with his last books, still writing. He never converted the Muslim world. He did something less dramatic and more useful: he proved, in his own person, that an adult with a reason can take a language that was closed to him and make it his own — and then spent his life arguing that everyone else should be given the same chance.
Every time you open a deck and produce a word from memory instead of copying it, you are doing a small, sanitized version of what Llull did in a Majorcan house eight hundred years ago: paying the language in daily attention until it answers. The difference is that your teacher is a deck you carry in your pocket, and nobody was enslaved to put it there. Use the advantage. He would have wanted it used.