Solomon Ibn Gabirol (1021/22–1050/70 CE) was born in Málaga and died in Valencia. He wrote a body of secular and liturgical poetry considered among the greatest of the Middle Ages, as well as a work of Neo-Platonist philosophy. That work, originally in Arabic, became a significant philosophical text in Medieval Europe in its Latin translation Fons Vitae, attributed to Avicebron (a corruption of Ibn Gabirol’s name). He began composing poems as a teenager. An orphan who suffered much of his life from a painful and disfiguring disease, he had unstable relationships with patrons and spent the later part of his life wandering.