Author(s): Jonathan Lyons

History

For centuries following the fall of Rome, Western Europe was backward and benighted, locked into the Dark Ages and barely able to tell the time of day. Augustine had decreed that belief not reason should be the guiding light of Christian thinking, and partially as a result its people lived in a world of nominal literacy and subsistence farming, where blind faith, superstition and sorcery took the place of medicine and the church harnessed nascent aggression among the kingdoms to its own ends in the pursuit of astonishingly violent and cruel holy wars - the First Crusades.
Arab culture, however, was thriving, and had become a powerhouse of intellectual exploration and discussion that dazzled the likes of Adelard of Bath who ventured in search of its scientific riches in cities like Antioch or Baghdad, whose House of Wisdom held four hundred thousand books at a time when the best European libraries housed at most several dozen. The Arabs could measure the earth's circumference, a feat not matched in the West for eight hundred years; they discovered algebra, sine and other trigonometric functions, and the use of zero; were adepts at astronomy and navigation, charted the constellations, made maps, accurately told the time, developed the astrolabe, translated all the Greek texts including, importantly, those of Aristotle; they made paper and lenses and mirrors.
Without them, and the knowledge that travellers like Adelard brought back to the West, Europe would in all likelihood have been a very different place over the last millennium.

In this fascinating and thoughtful book Jonathan Lyons restores credit to the Arab thinkers of the past, explores and reveals the extent of their learning and describes the intrepid adventures of those who went in search of it and who, in doing so, laid the foundations of what we now call the Renaissance. First published 2009.