Well, again that’s great, but can you give me a cite?
Start with the appropriate chapters in these books:
Not to mention the capture of the Arab libraries at Cordoba and Grenada, which yielded countless treasures. Hasn’t anybody watched “The Day The Universe Changed?” 
Klaatu Granada Niktu? :eek:
This little biography on Gerard of Cremona goes into one of the biggest sources of medieval cross-cultural transmission - the Arabic translation school of Toledo:
http://www.wiu.edu/users/mfihd/research/gerard/gerard.html
- Tamerlane
That’s what I was thinking of when I read this thread. “The Day the Universe Changed” said outright that the sacking of Cordoba and Grenada and the discovery of long-lost (to the West) manuscripts there led to a huge rediscovery of much of history, geography, math, science, you name it. It’s probably the template for every “Raiders of the Lost Ark” story ever told.
I love how that description of The Day the Universe Changed mentions how the Crusaders “recaptured” Arab scientific knowledge, as though it was rightfully the Europeans’.
Yeah, it’s been suggested that the taking of Spain and the libraries there may have contributed quite a bit to the Christian Gothic . . . um, renaissance for lack of a better term. The stuff coming out of those plundered libraries struck Christian European scholars as marvellous and was a very definite and concrete example of what you’re asking for.
The film Destiny provides a good dramatized example of the transmission of Islamic learning into European culture in the 12th century.
It’s based on the real life of the Spanish Arab philosopher Averroës*, and uses his example to call for supporting reason and tolerance instead of religious extremism. One of the characters is a Christian guy from France who has made friends with Averroës and his circle of Arab rationalists. He translates Arabic philosophical manuscripts and smuggles them into France, where the ecclesiastical authorities burn heretics at the stake for disseminating such ideas. Meanwhile, in Muslim Spain, an armed group of Islamic extremists is threatening to shut down freedom of thought. Modern viewers will see in them an obvious parallel to contemporary jihadist issues in the Arab world, but in fact there was such a jihad group, the Almohads (al-Muwahhidûn), that did try to shut down Averroës. Coincidentally, the dangerous Islamists of today, the Wahhabis, call themselves al-Muwahhidûn.
I wish the whole Western world and Islamic world could get together and watch this movie, as it belongs to the nexus of their shared history and contemporary relevance.
*Real name: Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Rushd, or just “Ibn Rushd” for short. (1126-1198)
I remember reading a British history magazine many years ago. (They were doing a series of articles covering the Danelaw thru the Norman Conquest.)
One of the old letters they quoted was a local Anglo-Saxon lord complaining about the horrible things the Norsemen did to woo the local ladies. E.g., taking baths and combing their beards. Talk about your uncivilized barbarians!
The Norsemen were also well known for carving their names and deeds onto local rocks and such. Showing off literacy is definitely something to be frowned upon.
Well, the barbarians were barbarians - that is not Roman or fully Romanized, although for most if not all that is exactly what they wanted to be. So you had a huge mixture of customs and language and individual style/tastes that did not match the fairly uniform culture of the Romans. Add that to the breakdown of communication and trade caused by the lack of a single government, things were, from a traditional Roman point of view, dark. Knowledge of any kind, was not really lost, but isolated in specific areas or to specific groups, who might in turn not have access to the rest of the world’s knowledge. Advances in farming, architecture, shipbuilding, metal working, the invention of capitalism, warfare (especially heavy cavalry) and the virtual end of slavery were all part of “dark age” and barbarian achievements.
Alexander Pope sums it up wonderfully in these lines from The Dunciad (a little hard on poor old Mohammed, but hey it’s the 18th century):
'How little, mark! that portion of the ball,
Where, faint at best, the beams of science fall:
Soon as they dawn, from Hyperborean skies
Embodied dark, what clouds of Vandals rise!
Lo! where Maeotis sleeps, and hardly flows
The freezing Tanais through a waste of snows,
The North by myriads pours her mighty sons,
Great nurse of Goths, of Alans, and of Huns! 90
See Alaric’s stern port! the martial frame
Of Genseric! and Attila’s dread name!
See the bold Ostrogoths on Latium fall;
See the fierce Visigoths on Spain and Gaul!
See, where the morning gilds the palmy shore,
(The soil that arts and infant letters bore,)
His conquering tribes the Arabian prophet draws,
And saving ignorance enthrones by laws.
See Christians, Jews, one heavy sabbath keep,
And all the western world believe and sleep.
The thought strikes me, that the reason that Roman culture was NOT adopted 100% by the barbarians, was that the old imperial structure made no sense. Without Rome to run the armies, there was no need to retain the boundaries, and no authority to maintain the roads. That is why Britain was abandoned-there was no way to defend it and maintain the trade links. Just stopping the road maintainence was enought to end the empire-Rome depended on its roads and ports for its food supply-a city so large couold not exist without them. Hence the rapid decline of the weast after 520 AD. The retreat in the fuedal system was ordained by the banruptcy of the imperial system-even the “reforms” of Diocletian hastened the end of the Western Empire.
By some indications, the “barbarians” were civilized long before the Romans got there. There is evidence of fortified towns, the use of coins and associated currency economy, widespread trade, writing systems, and road networks between population centers, among other things. Some places were actually worse off after conquest than before. The change wasn’t always one-way. Knowledge and customs from the borders of the Empire were carried back to Rome by new citizens and administrators. I read The Barbarians Speak a few years ago, which talks about some of the accomplishments of the civilizations the Romans conquered and what influence they had in the capital.