Albert was born to the Counts of Bollstädt in Bavarian Swabia. He studied at the University of Padua, where he encountered the new Aristotelian science arriving via Arabic translation, and around 1223 joined the new Dominican Order. He was sent to teach at Cologne, Hildesheim, Freiburg, Regensburg, Strasbourg — and at Paris, where Thomas Aquinas was his student.
He was the first medieval Christian thinker to comment systematically on the entire surviving Aristotelian corpus — physics, metaphysics, biology, ethics, politics — making Aristotle's natural philosophy available to Latin Christianity in a way that prepared the ground for Aquinas's theological synthesis. He was equally a natural scientist in his own right: his treatises on plants, on animals, on minerals, on alchemy, on astronomy, on meteorology contain firsthand observations that are still cited in the history of science.
Made Bishop of Regensburg in 1260 against his will, he resigned after two years to return to teaching. In 1277, when the Bishop of Paris condemned a number of propositions taken (in part) from Aquinas, the seventy-seven-year-old Albert travelled to Paris in person to defend his late student — saying that anyone who slandered Thomas slandered the truth itself.
He was canonised and declared a Doctor of the Church on the same day by Pius XI in 1931. Pius XII made him patron of natural scientists in 1941. His body, found incorrupt at his first exhumation, was found reduced to a skeleton at a second; the bones rest in a Roman sarcophagus in the crypt of St. Andrew's Church in Cologne.