Lyons presents the remarkable story of how medieval Arab scholars made dazzling advances in science and philosophy--and of the itinerant Europeans who brought this knowledge back to the West.
In this brilliant, evocative book Jonathan Lyons reveals the story of how Europe drank from the well of Muslim learning..
Even while their countrymen waged bloody Crusades against Muslims, a handful of intrepid Christian scholars, hungry for knowledge, traveled East and returned with priceless jewels of science, medicine, and philosophy that laid the foundation for the Renaissance.
Jonathan Lyons shows just how much Western ideas owe to the Golden Age of Arab civilization.
When the best libraries in Europe held several dozen books, Baghdad\'s great library, The House of Wisdom, housed four hundred thousand .
There, philosophers, mathematicians, and astronomers were steadily advancing the frontiers of knowledge, as well as keeping alive the works of Plato and Aristotle.
Meanwhile Arab culture was thriving, dazzling those Europeans fortunate enough to visit cities like Baghdad or Antioch.
For centuries following the fall of Rome, Western Europe was a benighted backwater, a world of subsistence farming, minimal literacy, and violent conflict.
Lyons presents the remarkable story of how medieval Arab scholars made dazzling advances in science and philosophy--and of the itinerant Europeans who brought this knowledge back to the West
