> Without the Arab and Muslim scholarship much of Greek/Roman wisdom would be lost. I've just been on a holiday in Venice and Florence, which made me question

> Without the Arab and Muslim scholarship much of Greek/Roman wisdom would be lost. I've just been on a holiday in Venice and Florence, which made me question that standard wisdom, as I learnt more about Venice and Constantinople. The most important effect of those texts, I guess, was the Italian Renaissance. Petrarch seems to have found his books by hunting through old piles in attics, and the Venetians got (looted?) theirs directly from the Byzantines. It isn't clear to me that the Arabs had a major role. The Spanish got their classical books from the Moors. But what did they do with those books, and why does that matter?