write, and Frederic Barbarossa could not read.
John, king of Bohemia, and Philip, the Hardy, king
of France, were ignorant of both accomplishments.
The graces of literature were tolerated only in the
ranks of the clergy; the layman who preferred letters
to arms was regarded as a man of mean spirit.
When the Crusaders took Constantinople, in 1204,
they exposed to public ridicule the pens and inkstands
that they found in the conquered city as the
ignoble arms of a contemptible race of students.

"During this period of intellectual darkness,
which lasted from the fifth until the fifteenth century,
a period sometimes described, and not improperly,
as the dark ages, there was no need for
any improvement in the old method of making
books. The world was not then ready for typography.
The invention waited for readers more than
it did for types; the multitude of book buyers
upon which its success depended had to be created.
Books were needed as well as readers. The treatises
of the old Roman sophists and rhetoricians, the
dialectics of Aristotle and the schoolmen, and the
commentaries on ecclesiastical law of the fathers of
the church, were the works which engrossed the
attention of men of letters for many centuries before
the invention of typography. Useful as these books
may have been to the small class of readers for
whose benefit they were written, they were of no
use to a people who needed the elements of knowledge."