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the New World.
There were at least two other major sources of the influx of Eastern ideas and produce into Europe which were separate to the journey known as the First Crusade: the cultures of Spain and Sicily.
Arguably, each of these had greater, influences on European development than the journeys of those who founded the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
Spain, for example, was the home of Ibn Rushd or Averroes, whose commentaries on Artistotle were revived in a Europe which had forgotten them, laying the groundwork for St Thomas' Summa Theologica.
Arabic Spain also perhaps inspired the troubadours of Provence. The troubadours sang in rhymed stanzas invented by Moslem poets who spoke of love in similar Platonic terms to those used by the troubadours. It may be that the concept of chivalric love that was the mainstay of troubadour culture was invented by the aristocrats of Cordoba. An exhaustive treatise on this was written by an Arab theologian Ibn Hazm in The Ring of the Dove. It explores all the nuances of desires and concluded that the noblest of loves comes through patience, restraint and chastity: a union of souls which was a sublime bliss, a lofty rank a permanent joy and a gift of God.
The great age of formal romantic love is the twelfth century, and the region most associated with it is the south of France, the Languedoc, a country from which many of the most important Crusaders originated or in which they had family ties.
In addition, medieval scholars deliberately involved themselves in encounters with the Moors of Spain at the beginning of the great age of Love.
Abbot Peter of Cluny wrote to inform Bernard of Clairvaux in the twelfth century that while he was staying in Spain for a visitation of the Cluniac places he had translated from the Arabic into the Latin "all the unholy sectarian documents and the detestable life of its very bad inventor Mohammed" so that it might be known how foul and worthless this heresy is. The Cluny establishments of France were brought into Spain just before the First Crusade.
The work was done under Peter of Cluny's auspices by Master Peter of Toledo. Because Peter of Toledo was not as familiar with Latin as he was with Arabic, he was assisted by another brother, Peter of Poitiers.
As well, translations were made by an Englishman, Robert Ketton, who then became archdeacon of the church in Pamplona, and Herman of Dalmatia. Peter the Venerable had found these two brothers around the Ebro River, studying astrology. Peter the Venerable had hired them to do the work by means of a very large remuneration. It is not impossible to imagine their work being spread more widely through their contacts in England and the Balkans.5
The transmission of Arabic culture into central Europe was, therefore, in part a deliberate undertaking done at a time when the Crusades were exciting the interest of the Christians in a group of previously remote heretics.
At the same time, it should not be assumed that this exchange was purely the result of an abrupt discovery made in 1095. Contact between East and West had never entirely broken down. Charlemagne was in contact with African rulers in the ninth century, and an Arab travelled with the Vikings at the same time.
By the mid eleventh century, groups of Norman adventurers were sacking and settling amongst the Saracens in places such as Sicily. Vikings travelled easily and frequently between Iceland and Constantinople, trading, exploring, plundering and serving as mercenaries.
The Normans who conquered Sicily under Roger de Hauteville of Normandy, were mesmerized by its two century old Moslem culture. They found an admirable administrative system in place, a silk weaving industry, and the cultivation of sugar cane, flax and olives.
De Hauteville's son Roger II or Roger the Pagan had a coronation robe decorated in Arabic inscriptions. His court's leading scholar was a Spanish Arab Idrisi, who amongst other things produced a model of the world suggestive that it was round. By the time of Frederick II (1197), Arabic was one of the kingdom's four official languages. In 1224 Frederick founded the first chartered university in Europe, the University of Naples, endowed with his collection of Arab writings. St Thomas Aquinas was a student there.6
And it is strange that more direct influence did not reach Europe proper from Spain at an earlier date. Nearly all the foodstuffs and luxuries - paper, silks, large stone castles, comfortable houses - seized upon by the Franks during the First Crusade had been known in Spain for a hundred years or more.
Yet there is little direct evidence to suggest that they were filtering their way north before the Crusade.
An example of how the little things accumulated into a tidal wave that swept away the old defences of European conservatism was the humble piece of paper.
Right throughout the period leading up to the Renaissance the transmission of ideas was stifled by the high cost, equalling the lack of availability, of material for transmitting ideas. Parchments were the main elements of medieval books, and were related in value to their high cost of production.
Paper, made from rags and vegetable matter, had been known in Baghdad by 794, and had contributed the explosion of Arabic culture by providing a cheap, high quality means of sending and recording ideas. Thus, Thabit ibn Qurra (825-901) working in Mesopotamia translated into Arabic about 150 books on logic, mathematics, astronomy and medicine contained in the writings of ancients such as Archimedes, Euclid, Ptolemy and Theodosius. Another writer and scholar, Hunayn ibn Ashaq (809-73) translated Galen's medical studies into Syrian and Arabic.7
The scope of reading amongst easterners is shown in the experience of the Arabic writer Usama, who in the twelfth century complained bitterly of the loss to Frankish pirates of 4,000 books in paper, a mere part of his personal library.
The process of paper making was learned by a Crusader, Jean Montgolfier, in Damascus while he was a prisoner after being captured on the Second Crusade. He apparently produced paper after his return from Crusade to France in 1157. However, for whatever reason, he did not produce commercial quantities of this marvellous new product. That was left to Italian merchants, whose products became more widely available in the thirteenth century.
It was on paper that some of the most exquisite artefacts of the Renaissance were later
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