A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Otherwise the West had known little of Aristotle’s work. By contrast, scholars in the Islamic world and the Jewish communities whom the Muslims sheltered had direct knowledge of Aristotle, whose writings had been preserved largely by scholars of the Church of the East (see pp. 245–6 and 266). Gradually, Aristotle’s texts reached the West. The first influx came through the Spanish Christian capture of Muslim Toledo and its libraries in 1085, and then much more through contacts established during the Crusades (one of their more positive results). Once they were translated into Latin, the effect was profound: Western thought, enriched afresh by manuscripts containing Classical learning, experienced another movement of renewal, which has been called the twelfth-century Renaissance.