Although western Europe did not consider itself an intellectual backwater around the end of the first millennium a.d., the reality was that by the year 1000 it lagged far behind other parts of the world. The Carolingian manuscript machine at Aachen, cathedral schools dotted across France, England, and Germany, and monastic libraries stocked chiefly with texts by Christian writers were all well and good. But any traveler who struck out east for the great cities of the Arab and Persian world would quickly realize where the real engine of global intellectual inquiry lay: in the lands of the
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