Complutensian Polyglot

Monumental multilingual edition of the Bible published in Spain in 1520. Begun in 1502, under the patronage of Cardinal Francisco Ximénes de Cisneros, it made the Bible text available for the first time in parallel columns of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. The project employed leading Spanish scholars, including Antonio Nebrija – but he resigned from the work because of what he considered to be the conservatism of the editing, which preferred to keep Vulgate mistranslations than to question orthodoxy. Nebrija's own desire for a philologically more accurate version of the Bible was pre-empted by Erasmus's Novum Instrumentum.

Ximénes de Cisneros, the confessor to Queen Isabella, was the founder of the university of Alcalá (Latin name: Complutum), the town after which this Bible is known.