Chapter 3 - Knowledge Exchange

Summary

Around the year 1000, Latin Europe was, generally speaking, a cultural, economic, and political backwater, with the glories of ancient Rome but a dimly recalled memory. The economy was stagnant and there was no centralized or centralizing state power strong enough to bring together the often warring petty states of the region. Consequently, there was little money or opportunity to keep the ancient knowledge alive, much less to create anything new. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, this had all changed. By then, Latin Europe contained many strong, centralized states whose economies were booming despite the fighting that plagued the continent almost incessantly. The knowledge of the ancients, once almost lost, had been rediscovered and developed further. Philosophy, scientific enquiry, and medical knowledge became revivified, permitting further discoveries that would eventually lead to Europeans striking out from their homelands to discover the rest of the world.

It was the institution of crusading that was in large part responsible for this transformation in the continent's condition, for it was via the crusading arenas that the knowledge of antiquity, kept alive in the Islamic world and in Byzantium, passed into Latin Europe. The primary arena in which this occurred was the Iberian Peninsula, which was drawn into the crusading movement during the twelfth century as the Christian kingdoms of the north expanded southward and conquered territory from the Muslims during the Reconquista. Yet scientific exchange also occurred in Sicily and southern Italy—where the eleventh- and twelfth-century Norman kingdom and the thirteenth-century Hohenstaufen state contained significant numbers of Muslims, as well as Greek-speaking Greek Orthodox Christians—and in the eastern Mediterranean, where the crusader states provided Latin Christians with close contact with the central Islamic lands for the first time. In these three areas, Latin Europeans enriched themselves by rediscovering knowledge in a number of different fields, eventually leading to the creation of the modern world.

Language Learning

The main mechanism by which all knowledge exchange between Christians and Muslims occurred was through the acquisition of at least one of the languages of the other religious group.