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Message: <blockquote data-quote="S'mon" data-source="post: 4653012" data-attributes="member: 463">Well, the way it seems to me is that for a long time in western Europe the church was the only source of literacy - the only clerks were clerics.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  The barbarian invaders were illiterate, and so were their descendants for many hundreds of years.  The peasants were illiterate.  Secular literacy basically died out.  Without the church there would have been no literary tradition remaining in the West at all.Islam's primary effect on western Europe was to close the Mediterranean to sea traffic for centuries, isolate the West from Byzantium, and keep the West in an illiterate and primitive state.  The crusades starting in the late 11th century AD led to renewed contact with Byzantium, and to a degree with Islamic-world scholars (often actually non-Muslim Jews and Christians) and recreated a transmission belt of knowledge into western Europe.Then the fall of Byzantium in the mid 15th century led to a flood of Greek scholars west to Italy and the beginnings of the Renaissance in the West.  Byzantium had preserved an unbroken literary tradition and for a long time was the only part of the West that could be meaningfully considered 'civilised'.  However the loss of half of Christendom to Islamic conquest in the 7th-9th centuries and Byzantium's consequent long twilight struggle against the Arabs, Seljuks and Ottoman limited Byzantium's influence on the West.  Getting sacked by crusaders didn't help either.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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