The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died

by Philip Jenkins

The city had a rich history of Christian intellectual and spiritual life from the sixth century through the thirteenth, and Merv could compete in vigor with any European center, certainly before the universities emerged in western Europe during the twelfth century. Merv’s scholars had access to Syriac versions of Aristotle at a time when these texts were quite forgotten in western Europe.