The Writings of Aristotle and the Greeks Return to Europe

When the Western Roman Empire fell in 500 AD, Europe lost access to the writings of the Greeks - the intellectual foundation of the Roman Empire. But the Eastern Roman Empire based in Constantinople, no longer in communication with the West, preserved the Greek knowledge.

The great Islamic Caliphs were very interested in these writings and acquired copies from Constantinople’s libraries, using, refining and building on them to create a system of astrology. The powerful Caliphates greatly improved upon, and then spread, the Astrolabe – a tool for taking precise sky measurements - throughout the Islamic world. 

Around 1000 A.D. Greek writings reentered the Western Latin world – along with the astrolabe - via the Pyrenees Mountains between France and Moorish Spain, possibly with Gerbert of Aurillac, the future Pope Sylvester II. They quickly made their way to the new French Universities.

The 500 year absence of Aristotle from Western Europe ended, the next 500 years saw first a spread and then a questioning of these ideas across Europe’s budding intellectual centers.

Islamic scholars created vast new sets of sky measurements, debated and revised both Aristotle and Ptolemy, and may even have proposed an Earth centered universe – though many of their intellectual efforts never seem to have reached Europe.