development at Bagdad was in part due to the patronage of a few caliphs of
large vision, and was of relatively short duration. The religious
enthusiasts among the Mohammedans were in reality but little more zealous
for Hellenic learning than the Fathers of the Western Church had been.
Finally, about 1050, they obtained the upper hand and succeeded in driving
out the Hellenic Mohammedans, just as the Eastern Christians had driven
out the Nestorians, and these scholars of the East now fled to northern
Africa and to Spain. [4] Almost at once a marked further development in
the intellectual life of Spain took place. In Cordova, Granada, Toledo,
and Seville strong universities were developed, where Jews and Hellenized
Mohammedans taught the learning of the East, and made further advances in
the sciences and mathematics. Physics, chemistry, astronomy, mathematics,
physiology, medicine, and surgery were the great subjects of study. Greek
philosophy also was taught. They developed schools and large libraries,
taught geography from globes, studied astronomy in observatories, counted
time by pendulum clocks, invented the compass and gunpowder, developed
hospitals, and taught medicine and surgery in schools (R. 86).

Their cities were equally noteworthy for their magnificent palaces, [5]
mosques, public baths, market-places, aqueducts, and paved and lighted
streets--things unknown in Christian Europe for centuries to come (R. 85).
It became fashionable for wealthy men to become patrons of learning, and
to collect large libraries and place them at the disposal of scholars,
thus revealing interests in marked contrast to those of the fighting
nobility of Christian Europe.

THEIR INFLUENCE ON WESTERN EUROPE. Western Europe of the tenth to the
twelfth centuries presented a dreary contrast, in almost every particular,
to the brilliant life of southern Spain. Just emerging from barbarism, it
was still in an age of general disorder and of the simplest religious