model was founded, a large library was organized, and an observatory was
built. Large numbers of students thronged the city, learned Greeks and
Jews taught in the schools, and a number of advances on the scientific
work done by the Greeks were made. A degree of the earth's surface [3] was
measured on the shores of the Red Sea; the obliquity of the ecliptic was
determined (c. 830); astronomical tables were calculated; algebra and
trigonometry were perfected; discoveries in chemistry not known in Europe
until toward the end of the eighteenth century, and advances in physics
for which western Europe waited for Newton (1642-1727), were made; and in
medicine and surgery their work was not duplicated until the early
nineteenth century. Their scholars wrote dictionaries, lexicons,
cyclopaedias, and pharmacopoeias of merit (R. 86).

This eastern learning was now gradually carried to Spain by traveling
Mohammedan scholars, and there the energy of conquest was gradually turned
to the development of schools and learning. By 900 a good civilization and
intellectual life had been developed in Spain, and before 1000 the
teaching in Spain, especially along Greek philosophical lines, had become
sufficiently known to attract a few adventurous monks from Christian
Europe. Gerbert (953-1003), afterward Pope Sylvester II (p. 159), was one
of the first to study there, though for this he was accused of having
transactions with the Devil, and when he died suddenly at fifty, four
years after having been elevated to the Papacy, monks over Europe are
recorded as having crossed themselves and muttered that the Devil had now
claimed his reward. A monk from Monte Cassino also studied at Bagdad, and
brought back some of the eastern learning to his monastery.

[Illustration: FIG. 51. SHOWING CENTERS OF MOSLEM LEARNING]

MOHAMMEDAN REACTION SENDS SCHOLARS TO SPAIN. The great intellectual