monastic and other libraries about the eastern Mediterranean. So
greatly did they prize these records, which were contemned by the
Christians, that it was their frequent custom to weigh the old
manuscripts in payment against the coin of their realm. In astronomy,
mathematics, chemistry, and geology the Arabian students, building on
the ancient foundations, made notable and for a time most important
advances. In the tenth century of our era they seemed fairly in the
way to do for science what western Europe began five centuries later
to accomplish. In the fourteenth century the centre of Mohammedan
strength was transferred from the Arabians to the Turks, from a people
naturally given to learning to a folk of another race, who despised
all such culture. Thenceforth in place of the men who had treasured
and deciphered with infinite pains all the records of earlier
learning, the followers of Mohammed zealously destroyed all the
records of the olden days. Some of these records, however, survived
among the Arabs of Spain, and others were preserved by the Christian
scholars who dwelt in Byzantium, or Constantinople, and were brought
into western Europe when that city was captured by the Turks in the
fifteenth century.

Already the advance of the fine arts in Italy and the general tendency
toward the study of Nature, such as painting and sculpture indicate,
had made a beginning, or rather a proper field for a beginning, of
scientific inquiry. The result was a new interest in Greek learning in
all its branches, and a very rapid awakening of the scientific spirit.
At first the Roman Church made no opposition to this new interest
which developed among its followers, but in the course of a few years,
animated with the fear that science would lead men to doubt many of
the dogmas of the Church, it undertook sternly to repress the work of
all inquirers.