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Originally Posted by crich70
Yep you're right. The ancient Greek and Latin texts were translated into other languages (in Spain I think) and then with the crusades and men like El Cid the translations were found in the cities libraries and translated for the western world.
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That's right; Knowledge of Greek had essentially disappeared in Europe, and with it, the works of the Greek philosophers, except a small amount that had been preserved by the church as being in agreement with its teachings. These manuscripts had been preserved in the Islamic world, and came back to Europe with the Moorish invasion of Spain in the 8th century. Moorish cities like Granada became centres of learning, where Christian scholars re-learned Greek and were essentially given back their own cultural heritage by the Islamic world. European culture would have been very much the poorer without this; it's difficult to imagine that later Western philosophers could have existed without the foundations laid by the ancient Greeks, and that knowledge would have been lost had it not been preserved in the Islamic world.