This is a factoid that I've been carrying around for a while, but it looks sort of true. Fibonacci introduced Arabic numerals in 1202, which slowly grew to pred

This is a factoid that I've been carrying around for a while, but it looks sort of true. Fibonacci introduced Arabic numerals in 1202, which slowly grew to predominate over Roman numerals/abacus use by circa 1600. So it's not that educated Europeans couldn't do complex division, they simply used abaci and clunky Roman numerals rather than long division. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liber_Abaci https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liber_Abaci