>>520966885
And guess who brought this knowledge back to Western Europe?

>The Renaissance of the 12th century was a period of many changes at the outset of the High Middle Ages. It included social, political and economic transformations, and an intellectual revitalization of Western Europe with strong philosophical and scientific roots. These changes paved the way for later achievements such as the literary and artistic movement of the Italian Renaissance in the 15th century and the scientific developments of the 17th century

>Harvard professor Charles Homer Haskins was the first historian to write extensively about a renaissance that ushered in the High Middle Ages starting about 1070. In 1927, he wrote that:

>"[The 12th century in Europe] was in many respects an age of fresh and vigorous life. The epoch of the Crusades, of the rise of towns, and of the earliest bureaucratic states of the West, it saw the culmination of Romanesque art and the beginnings of Gothic; the emergence of the vernacular literatures; the revival of the Latin classics and of Latin poetry and Roman law; the recovery of Greek science, with its Arabic additions, and of much of Greek philosophy; and the origin of the first European universities. The 12th century left its signature on higher education, on the scholastic philosophy, on European systems of law, on architecture and sculpture, on the liturgical drama, on Latin and vernacular poetry..."

>The era of the Crusades brought large groups of Europeans into contact with the technologies and luxuries of Byzantium for the first time in many centuries. Crusaders returning to Europe brought numerous small luxuries and souvenirs with them, stimulating a new appetite for trade. The rising Italian maritime powers such as Genoa and Venice began to monopolize trade between Europe, Muslims, and Byzantium via the Mediterranean Sea, having developed advanced commercial and financial techniques