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Western Europe Made Lighter?
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gcle2003 View Drop Down
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Posts: 7035 		  Quote gcle2003 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Topic: Western Europe Made Lighter?
    Posted: 07-Jun-2007 at 09:45
 
Originally posted by Kamikaze 738

Originally posted by gcle2003

'Imperial Islam' wasn't even able to establish a single, central authority in the Islamic world (for longer than one generation).


Same for Western Europe so would Islamic influence in Western Europe have any dramatic affect on the region?
Well, yes, it would have substituted Islam for Christianity as the dominant religion. Undoubtedly that would have led to other changes. What I don't believe is that the 'Islamic Europe' would have stayed part of a unified Islamic Empire.
 
Partly because there wasn't one anyway. Partly because Islam is not a monolithic religion the way Roman and Byzantine Catholicism were/are. I don't see why an Islamic conquest would have stopped the Europeans fighting each other any more than it stopped the peoples further east.
 


Originally posted by gcle2003

Christianity was the thing that was uniting the europeans


However, it didnt stop all the fighting such as English and French Hundreds Years War did it? Pinch
Nope. And Islam didn't stop the Mamelukes fighting the Mongols and the Ottomans at various times.


Edited by gcle2003 - 07-Jun-2007 at 09:46
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edgewaters View Drop Down
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Posts: 2394 		  Quote edgewaters Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 07-Jun-2007 at 13:12
Originally posted by Kamikaze 738

Would Islam just speed Western Europe into the Renaissance 700 years eariler than what they could have done alone? What kind of impact will that have for medieval Europe?[


It already did that, as much as it was going to. Via Spain. Do some math - now try to do it in Roman numerals!! You will quickly discover that many advancements would have been simply impossible without Islamic contributions, such as Arabic numerals and mathematics.

There are countless other ways in which Europe benefitted technologically from Islamic science which was unlocked to the rest of Europe after the Reconquista.

Edited by edgewaters - 07-Jun-2007 at 13:13
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Posts: 28 		  Quote Endre Fodstad Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 12-Jun-2007 at 10:53
 
 
Originally posted by edgewaters


It already did that, as much as it was going to. Via Spain. Do some math - now try to do it in Roman numerals!! You will quickly discover that many advancements would have been simply impossible without Islamic contributions, such as Arabic numerals and mathematics.
 
Ok, we'll just have to kill of a few misconceptions here. Fibonacci, the traditional introductor of hindu-arabic numerals into Europe, lived in the 12th and 13th century and learned about them in Algeria, not from Almohad Iberia. It took a long time (in many ways it is still not standard; we still use roman numerals for many purposes) before they became adapted all over Europe, but when they were adapted, they became, more or less, the standard numeral system - as opposed to in the muslim world, where hindo-arabic numerals were mainly used by mathematicians - natural scientists used a different numeral system, and merchants had yet another system (based on the arabic alphabet).
 
Originally posted by edgewaters


There are countless other ways in which Europe benefitted technologically from Islamic science which was unlocked to the rest of Europe after the Reconquista.
 
Yep. That is called cultural diffusion. It is a process as old as humanity, and never - and not in this case - always one-way. The image of an enlightened happy muslim world spilling its goodness all over europe is probably rather exaggarated - not wrong, but 6th-9th century Europe was hardly the dark and dismal mire it tends to be made out to be; the berber-arab conquerers of the Visigothic Kingdom absorbed the knowledge gathered in Seville and Toledo themselves - it bears remembering, for example, that the fourth council of Toledo, in 633, prescribed the study of Hebrew and Greek for iberian priests and pressed for further spread and development of medicine and roman law, and that Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae was still being copied and printed well into the 16th century.
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Posts: 2394 		  Quote edgewaters Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 13-Jun-2007 at 00:54
Originally posted by Endre Fodstad

Fibonacci, the traditional introductor of hindu-arabic numerals into Europe, lived in the 12th and 13th century and learned about them in Algeria, not from Almohad Iberia. It took a long time (in many ways it is still not standard; we still use roman numerals for many purposes) before they became adapted all over Europe, but when they were adapted, they became, more or less,the standard numeral system


Indeed, Arabic numerals would have been known in certain quarters long before the Reconquista ... but it's the Reconquista which accelerated their adoptation throughout Europe.

Originally posted by edgewaters

The image of an enlightened happy muslim world spilling its goodnessall over europe isprobably rather exaggarated - notwrong, but 6th-9th century Europe was hardly the dark and dismal mire it tends to be made out to be; the berber-arab conquerers of the Visigothic Kingdom absorbed the knowledge gathered in Seville and Toledo themselves


Of course, it depends on where you were. England, Germany, northern France, etc, were all relatively "dark and dismal" in terms of educational infrastructure in the 6th-9th centuries. Rome retained a fairly impressive set of institutions, as did a few other centers, including Seville and Toledo - but these latter were a loss to Western Christendom until the Reconquista.
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Posts: 28 		  Quote Endre Fodstad Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 13-Jun-2007 at 03:40

Originally posted by edgewaters


Indeed, Arabic numerals would have been known in certain quarters long before the Reconquista ... but it's the Reconquista which accelerated their adoptation throughout Europe.
 
Hardly -  the use of Hindu-Arabic numerals spread slowly and steadily from the early 13th century onward through the usual channels - manuscripts, practice, and the teaching of them at Universities thorough Europe. Even with that, their adaptation was slow, until the printing press was invented and information could be disseminated more rapidly. The idea that the Reconquista - or the fall of Byzantium, another favorite of 19th century historians - is the cause of the adaptation of arab invented and arab-transmitted ideas is rather old-fashioned in its monocausality. Rather, it appears that the fairly extensive contacts (commercial, cultural and warlike) christian europe and islamic europe, north africa and the middle east had with each other across the board fascilitatet the movement of ideas.

Originally posted by edgewaters


Of course, it depends on where you were. England, Germany, northern France, etc, were all relatively "dark and dismal" in terms of educational infrastructure in the 6th-9th centuries. Rome retained a fairly impressive set of institutions, as did a few other centers, including Seville and Toledo - but these latter were a loss to Western Christendom until the Reconquista.
 
While there is no doubt that, in educational infastructure, the early middle ages had little to rival the late roman or high medieval period, you are leaving out one of the more important venues for learning overall; church schools and cathedral schools, who trained both clerical and lay students in various numbers - as low as 50 and above 1000 (but typically between 100 and 200 students) are both recorded and who were probably instrumental in the development of the trivium and quadrivium teaching structures. It bears remembering that is was these schools - who dotted Europe in the 7th-9th centuries at least, that Isidore and the council relied upon to spread the educational reforms, and that many of them later would evolve into the medieval universities that our modern teaching institutions are direct descendants of.
 
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Posts: 1791 		  Quote Decebal Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 15-Jun-2007 at 11:17

Yes, there were some regions which were relatively backward in the second half of the first millenium in Western Europe, but then again they had always been (Germany, northern France, southern England), and some regions which had been "dark" were now a beacon of culture (Ireland and Northumbria in Northern England for instance). I recommend you look up the Nortunbrian Renaissance of the 7th and 8th centuries, for example.

Also, let's not forget that the backwardness of Western Europe was for the most part due to Islam itself, which had cut off the traditonal trade routes linking it to the Mediterranean basin. The loss of foodstuffs coming from the conquered regions of Egypt and North Africa, as well as that of the papyrus source, led to an increasing process of ruralization and decentralization. Cities, the engines of economic growth and culture, could simply not subsist in a dramatically altered trade system, and in a situation where the prime medium of recording information (papyrus) was now gone.  

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